In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, some organizations had a difficult time responding to the new IT needs of their end users. Shifting resources to accommodate a largely remote work environment proved to be a complicated endeavor. And, as IT staffers’ time and energies were focused on supporting these new workflows, routine maintenance and support tasks began to pile up.

But some companies tended to have an easier time with the shift. One common denominator for these organizations: They largely relied on software-defined solutions in their data centers. Find out why.

Driving greater automation is a process that underlies most every project in the data center. It’s an important business differentiator that can help determine an organization’s success. And like all good things, there are lots of problems that gum it up. Having greater awareness of some of these roadblocks will help you see and address them sooner.

Three of the most common problems you’ll encounter are: long system uptime, manual restarts and dated processes. This post will help you address them and strengthen your automation efforts.

The pace of change in IT is only accelerating, with many industry observers predicting that we’ll see the same amount of change over the next two to five years as we did in the past 10 or 15.

We’re already moving toward a world where data centers are able to handle 100,000 or more microservices, each created and ended on demand, in real time. But to get there, organizations will need to undertake another round of IT modernization. Here are some of the capabilities that organizations should consider as they get started.

It’s been more than a year since CDW first published the “Smart Data for Finance” white paper, and much has changed in the industry and at CDW. We’ve broadened our analytics practice to cover many different industries and brought in subject matter experts who can tailor analytics solutions to the needs of many diverse businesses….

When I talk with customers, many tell me that their data center teams spend around 80 percent of their time “keeping the lights on,” performing routine management and support tasks. There are a number of problems with this situation. First, an employee who spends 80 percent of working hours on rote tasks will be able…

Most IT managers understand the potential benefits of adopting orchestration and automation tools within their data centers to streamline the provisioning of private and public cloud resources. These solutions can dramatically speed up the time to value (the period between when a business need arises and when infrastructure fulfills that need). By automating manual tasks…