In recent months, organizations across industries have been forced to adopt new approaches throughout their entire operations. Barbers started giving outdoor haircuts and accepting contactless payments. Schools have equipped their students and instructors with laptops, sent them home and invented new methods of teaching and learning on the fly. Sports teams have even played in empty stadiums, with professional basketball players enclosing themselves in a “bubble” for a COVID-free playoff tournament.

The pressures of the coronavirus pandemic have also led to changes in many data centers. This new business environment has forced companies to embrace modernization, especially those that may have previously lagged behind on needed changes.

Here are four ways that I’m seeing savvy IT and business leaders improve their data center infrastructure and operations through digital transformation.

A large organization I work with recently experienced a serious cybersecurity incident. Ransomware had struck the business, crippling its technology systems and causing an outage that lasted more than 300 hours. This type of outage would have a devastating impact for any organization, but this company felt the pain acutely because it is a Software as a Service provider. The ransomware took down its SaaS offerings which, in turn, affected the critical business operations of hundreds of its customers.

After the dust settled, the company’s CISO contacted CDW to ask how we could help him better mitigate and respond to disasters in the future. He knew that deficiencies existed in the company’s technology architecture. He also understood that correcting the deficient technologies would not be enough. They needed assistance identifying gaps in their program in addition to understanding the impact of losing their SaaS offerings. The firm was determined to avoid the financial and reputational damage of another serious outage.

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working with and researching some of the top SD-WAN vendors in the market right now to continue developing CDW’s Professional Services. In this blog series, I’d like to share overviews of each solution, my thoughts and the strengths and areas for improvement that I think apply to each solution. The goal of this blog series is to focus on technical aspects of these solutions and to avoid marketing fluff.

This blog will look at another one of the top contenders: Silver Peak Systems

The global pandemic and social distancing measures have redefined the office for many people. Industries that never would have considered allowing their office employees to work from home were forced to rethink decades of business as usual.

This change has also brought new technology needs. Since these businesses had built technology infrastructures that relied on traditional network and application architecture, a shift had to occur. Suddenly, IT departments were dealing with overloaded VPNs or having to deploy a VPN that they never had to maintain before. Compound that with the fact that users are now accessing company resources from networks or assets that corporate IT has no control over, that most home routers are still vulnerable to exploitation and that, in many cases, the network gates were flung open in the name of productivity ― it’s enough to give any CISO an ulcer.

So how can companies mitigate these risks? Now that everyone is settling into a routine and we’re adjusting to this “new normal,” it’s an ideal time to reach out to your users and talk about security.

Keeping tabs on a sprawling software environment can be challenging. With a surge in work-from-home users, overwhelmed IT teams scrambling to respond, and a proliferation of Software as a Service opportunities that end users can quickly jump on by keying in their corporate credit cards, this problem has the potential to spiral out of control.

These problems can be solved with the right mix of technologies and practices, but unfortunately, simple barriers often stand in the way. Here is how to identify those barriers and overcome them.

For businesses ranging from mom-and-pop shops to major enterprises, the tech forecast is definitely cloudy. All the major cloud infrastructure vendors are seeing high double-digit growth each year, and public cloud service offerings as a whole are expected to net more than $200 billion in 2019, according to Gartner. But while the rest of the…