The public cloud offers significant benefits of flexibility and scalability. But it also comes with challenges — especially with regard to security. CDW’s complimentary Cloud Security Posture Assessment is designed to help organizations in this area.

If your organization finds itself dealing with security and compliance challenges in the cloud, here are some key reasons why you might consider engaging us to conduct a CSPA.

As many organizations shift elements of their IT infrastructures to the public cloud, they must be aware of the new risks this move carries. Often, organizations make the false assumption that, in outsourcing the ownership of hardware and data center operations, they have also outsourced security to the cloud service provider.

While this is partially true because the organization is no longer required to deal with physical and infrastructure security, stakeholders are still responsible for compliance, data security, application security and possibly platform security if they are managing their own virtual machines or containers. A CSP’s documentation of the shared responsibility model will explain in more detail where it delineates responsibility.

As organizations build multicloud environments, it’s important that they think strategically about guiding principles and capabilities. Multicloud may involve any combination of the major hyperscale public cloud platforms — Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform — or a hybrid that also includes private clouds.

For many organizations, multicloud works because it lets them use the provider that offers the best features, security, resilience or cost-effectiveness for a specific workload, without limiting them to a single option. Multicloud also facilitates the DevOps objective of providing rapid time to value for features or products. The ability to accelerate the frequency and quality of releases is a paramount goal of DevOps, and a well-maintained multicloud solution can help organizations achieve that objective.

Both multicloud and DevOps thrive on rapid-response flexibility, and that makes it essential to have a strategy that can guide important decisions.

Moving away from legacy file servers is on the agenda for many organizations right now. It’s understandable that many companies are still using these on-premises systems. File servers are old standbys, and most organizations have never had a pressing reason to modernize the way they store and manage their files.

However, the remote work boom stemming from the global pandemic has quickly changed this calculus. Companies’ VPN connections have been overloaded with employees trying to access huge amounts of data from home, and many business and IT leaders are searching for a new solution.

At CDW, we’ve begun offering file modernization workshops to help with this process. We’re able to assist companies with assessments of their existing data environments, helping them to define their goals and develop a plan to transfer files to cloud-based tools such as Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and Azure.

Here are four key benefits of file modernization.

Cloud governance is a framework that guides how end users make use of cloud services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment. It’s imperative to have good cloud governance because it’s a foundational element to your cloud practice that provides the ability to scale and be successful.

Migrating to the cloud is an exciting journey as it provides greater flexibility to the IT teams for creating resources and provisioning them. Gone are the days when it used to take weeks and months to request resources and additional provisioning from the infrastructure teams. Cloud vendors now provide the capabilities to create resources such as compute instances plus add-on software, databases, firewall groups, storage, etc. via APIs.

The cloud-provided capabilities are very powerful and can potentially bring many inconsistencies and resource ownership issues into the environment.

I recently fielded a call from a school district that had moved some virtual machines into the cloud with Amazon Web Services. The district had an initial scope (and budget) for just 30 VMs but then quickly expanded to well over 100 cloud instances. Predictably, costs skyrocketed.

This might look like an unforced error on the part of district officials. But even large enterprises with sophisticated IT shops often run into problems when they first migrate resources to the public cloud. They may let costs run out of control due to sprawl, for example, or have trouble maintaining an environment that complies with specific industry regulations, such as HIPAA, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

One simple solution to these problems is to enter a partnership with a trusted managed service provider such as CDW. Relying on deep experience developed over years of working closely with organizations in virtually all industries, an effective MSP can help businesses monitor and optimize their cloud environments for cost, performance, security and compliance.