During the global pandemic, Emerging Technologies — the area of IT that I focus on — has seen an exciting influx of new technologies and offerings in a short amount of time that help keep people safe and connected.

Some of these technologies, especially robotics and drones, are causing disruption in the channel in a couple of ways: by providing new avenues for people to communicate in a socially distant world and sanitizing entire rooms autonomously. These emerging technologies are providing peace of mind to coworkers, students and teachers as businesses and schools create plans to reopen.

RingCentral is one of the fastest growing communications platforms out there supporting messaging, video and phones. One of the core components to the platform for years has been the RingCentral Meetings (RCM) platform powered by Zoom on the backend. This rebranded third-party meeting technology seamlessly integrates with the phones and messaging at the core of the RingCentral Office platform, however, this arrangement is rapidly changing.

In April of this year, RingCentral announced their homegrown RingCentral Video (RCV) platform as another alternative. This development is not that surprising given the negative attention Zoom received recently around the security of its platform, along with the fact that Zoom launched its own Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform last year. All things considered, this seems like a good time for RingCentral to move its technology in a different direction.

When the coronavirus pandemic prompted a massive increase in remote work across the country in mid-March, countless customers came to CDW asking to purchase videoconferencing tools. Makes sense, right?

Yes — until you consider that some of these companies were already paying for collaboration suites that have videoconferencing capabilities; the companies simply had never used them.

While many organizations have adopted new collaboration tools in recent years, they often struggle to take full advantage of them. Here are five ways to get the most out of these essential solutions.

Here’s a bit of good news for businesses that have made the shift to remote work: If you give your employees what they need to do their jobs, having them work from home can boost the bottom line.

How individual companies enable remote work depends on their industries and staffing, of course, but in our experience at CDW, most invest in a similar set of connectivity tools and services. Here’s a look at three of those solutions, and some thoughts on how they can help remote workers be productive.

As we gradually emerge from a nationwide shelter in place, businesses across the country will be opening up to an uncertain future. One certainty is that we will not return to business as it was just a couple of months ago. We have already seen shelter in place measures lifted, with some states, counties and cities slowly reopening.

As more organizations return, we should anticipate that we will experience localized shutdowns if we see virus flare-ups. With this in mind, companies must be agile enough to evolve as the situation changes. The cloud presents several ways to help organizations pivot.

The sudden shutdown of physical offices across the country this spring has accelerated many organizations’ journeys down the digital transformation path. Companies that had previously been reluctant to adopt tools such as videoconferencing and cloud collaboration rolled those solutions out to users in a rush as they scrambled to enable remote work. Because they deployed so many solutions in such a short period of time, most organizations will want to undertake some sort of security assessment to be sure they haven’t opened themselves up to new vulnerabilities. But this moment also presents an opportunity for organizations to provide a permanent boost to their cybersecurity practices through ongoing engagements.

Here are three examples of CDW’s high-value cybersecurity offerings.