Being an IT manager was a very different career before the advent of cloud-based services. When it came to adding or replacing infrastructure, you had only one option: buy the latest hardware or software. So, IT would receive its budget and go off and buy the biggest and best kit it could.

Automation is one of the hottest trends in IT right now, for good reason. We all know that it can cut out some of the more tedious work involved in data centre management – but far more exciting is the way it can enable software development to proceed at a pace that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In this blog post, I explore what’s driving automation and how organisations can reap the most benefit.

The frontline of retail - your shop-floor staff - have had to step up in 2020 like never before. Which means they've needed seamless, reliable digital workspace solutions more than ever.

One of the great paradoxes of technology is that the more successful it is, the more invisible it becomes. Car technology is a case in point. Let me tell you a story to back up my thinking.

Don’t trust anyone - that’s the basic premise for an advanced approach to cyber security that is being increasingly deployed across forward-thinking organisations.

Cloud technology is nothing new. In fact, today’s largest cloud platform provider, Amazon Web Services, was founded way back in 2006 – just a year after YouTube. Since those early days, cloud has made businesses’ IT infrastructure more flexible, powered remote working, and helped many organisations adapt to change – especially this year. These benefits have, however, created significant hype and cloud now dominates the IT conversation like nothing else.

More people than ever are enjoying the benefits of connected working – where the latest technology tools are used to allow employees to do their jobs smoothly and productively, no matter where they are located. But as individuals, connected working means different things to different people, depending on the specifics of the task at hand. For employees performing creative or admin roles based primarily at home, it might mean flexible access to office systems, using multiple devices, wherever they are in their house. For a field engineer, meanwhile, it might be more about having a single point of contact to log their completed jobs while out on the road. The common thread, whatever the circumstances, is giving people the right tools to do their job - anytime, anywhere. For organisations looking to empower connected working, it is important to remember that there is no standardised approach to deployment. IT departments can be guilty of attempting to impose blanket technology solutions on workers, even if they are not suited to the needs of the end-user. It is far better to take a more dynamic approach to connected working, supported by flexible device ownership and evergreen management techniques, to ensure that employees are fully equipped for the task at hand with intrinsic intuitive security embedded.

A lax approach to cyber security can result in enormous disruption to your enterprise. Get it wrong, and damage to finances, operations and reputation can occur in an instant.

Edge Computing, seen by many as the next revolution for processing data, extends network boundaries and takes computing power to where data is created, collated and acted on. It delivers processing power to everyday objects and deep analytics capabilities to the core. Edge Computing will enable organisations of all sizes across every sector to develop new ways of working and innovative propositions that are more efficient while delivering better user experiences. Ashminder Ubhi (Ash), CDW Category Lead for Core Data Centre and Pete Hulme, CDW Practice Lead for Hybrid Infrastructure, discuss four fundamental questions on how to get the most from Edge Computing.