The COVID-19 pandemic has made widespread remote work the “new normal” — business analysts predict that 25 to 30 percent of people will still be working from home multiple days per week even at the end of next year.

It’s critical that business and IT leaders ensure they are giving users the tools they need to be as productive and secure as possible while working from home. This is done by creating categories of users based on their work styles and technology needs and then providing the appropriate tools. Here are five factors that business and IT leaders should consider as they seek to refine and optimize the work-from-home user personas within their organizations.

As businesses restructure and begin to reopen to a changed business environment, many are realizing the importance of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning ― and how integral collaboration technology is to these plans.

For the last several months, CDW has been busy working with our customers to address these DR and BC needs. Managed services often play a role in these engagements. In this blog, I will cover how CDW helps customers prepare for disaster events, how we help organizations operate during them and, finally, how we can assist in managing the user experience during the reopening stages as well as the “new normal” that will follow.

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.

Organizations have a number of compelling reasons to reduce complexity in their cloud environments, including lower costs, improved security and optimized performance, to name a few. One other benefit of highly efficient cloud environments often gets overlooked, but is a major consideration right now: business continuity. In a way, the COVID-19 crisis is the world’s largest business continuity exercise. We’re seeing right now, in very real terms, how organizations’ IT environments hold up to previously unimaginable challenges.

With demand for businesses to consume collaboration services in the cloud at an all-time high right now, CDW has added the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud) solution to its Managed Collaboration Anywhere (MCA) portfolio. This portfolio now includes managed collaboration solutions covering the complete Cisco Hosted and Cloud Calling portfolio of Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), Cisco UCM Cloud and Cisco Webex Calling. Cisco is currently providing collaboration solutions that deliver enterprise-grade service to more than 100 million devices.

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working with and researching some of the top software-defined WAN vendors in the market to continue developing CDW’s Professional Services. In this blog series, I’d like to share overviews of each solution, my thoughts, strengths and areas for improvement that I think apply to each solution. I’ll cover each vendor with a specific and technical lens.

We’ll kick off this series with Cisco SD-WAN, formerly Viptela.