CDW Managed Cloud Services Reviews

I am the only IT presence at Bolger Brothers. I can't possibly do everything for every aspect of the organization. I have to be kind of above it so I can't dive too deep because that takes too much time.

In the 16 years that I have been working with CDW, I have learned that they have the expertise and resources. Therefore, I can push off some of the more mundane day-to-day stuff and keep running tasks. This is one of those situations where I know I can trust them to keep things running and advise me of best practices. As the environment changes, e.g., our cloud solution and the IT roadmap in general, security practices change. I can't possibly keep up with it all. This service is just another resource to lean on. 

For managed services, we have them for two aspects: Office 365 and Amazon WorkSpaces. I am very familiar with Office. I have used that since it was a beta product at my previous job. I was not so familiar with WorkSpaces. Both environments were created prior to me joining. I really didn't have much input. So, I really inherited them. With Office 365, I can get in, change things, and be an administrator. I really don't have to lean on CDW too much for it. They are more for if I need a direct contact with Microsoft rather than having me go through a queue. They have resources they can ping directly. With WorkSpaces, I lean on them quite heavily. That is for the entire Amazon sphere. This is because WorkSpaces is a huge monster. There are all sorts of plugins. There are apps going in and APIs going out. This was created by a previous vendor for Bolgers Brothers so I didn't really get to see behind the curtain on this too much. 

This is probably a non-standard case study. We have actually been bug hunting for around the last two months, e.g., small issues that are not showstoppers. They are more annoying. We have been going through and squashing them. There was one bug where we couldn't find a specific reason as to why it occurs randomly through the company. We know why it occurs now. We don't really know why it pops up randomly, but all the printers will be gone. It's like, "Okay, what?" So, the traditional solution was to restart the workspace, but this was happening two to three times a week or even sometimes multiple times a day. It's like, "Well, this is annoying." So, we went on a bug hunt. We opened up a ticket and got engineers involved, pulling more resources into it. We had conference calls on debugging solutions. That's what I call a deep dive. It was to the point where we were on a conference call with engineers stacked on top of engineers who were all yelling at me to get logs as well as pull this and do that. Eventually, it just turned out to be a Group Policy Object (GPO). Something that should have been done during the initial setup and configuration almost three years ago wasn't done and that represented as a bug where you lost printers. While I could have dealt with it, it wasn't showstopping. It was annoying for me because I would get the call regardless if I was here or not. 

The ability to pull talent together from CDW, Amazon, and Microsoft is something that I could never do because I'm a lowly peon. Unless I am putting down seven or eight figures, Microsoft won't deal with me. However, CDW has the ability, through their team of talent, to say, "Hey, can you jump on this call?" and a very bored engineer is like, "That is a Group Policy Object. Here is the file to fix it." 

This is a very long-winded story about how I can lean on the CDW cloud teams (their Managed Cloud Services) in a way that Google doesn't really help me.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has found pitfalls and various things in the infrastructure, e.g., in routes, IP ranges, and security loopholes, that didn't need to be there. They stripped it down and went to a very flat topography, making it less complicated. So, there are less things to trip over and go wrong, which means less downtime.

They help us with managed services for our Microsoft Azure environment. They helped with the design at the very start (in January 2020). Now, they have moved into a managed services role.

It has helped us. We don't have to worry about things like:

• The operating system
• Patches
• Alerts
• Monitoring
• All of a sudden needing somebody skilled up with expertise in Microsoft Azure. 

We are able to have some of those daily functions and routines, like patching, completed by the vendor. This has allowed our team to focus on more long-term strategic interests, such as where we are going with the application or software, instead of needing to focus on keeping servers up and running. As a managed services provider, they are ensuring that the servers are on. They are monitoring the servers for uptime availability. This frees up our team to focus on the application, how the application is used, and more of a strategic direction with the technology, rather than keeping the lights on.

CDW Managed Cloud Services provides managed services to support our infrastructure solution. We don't need somebody worrying about maintaining the infrastructure and keeping it alive. They can instead spend their time, which is limited, on more strategic initiatives and focus on application administration instead of infrastructure administration.

CDW Managed Cloud Services enables us to deploy infrastructure services at our pace, not being limited by the availability of resources. If we want to design, manage, and scale up with that infrastructure, we can do that with the help of CDW. Without their help, we would need to hire a bunch of staff, probably on a project basis, and then reallocate their time to other places. This definitely allows us to be scalable with our approach to that environment. Just like Azure infrastructure is scalable, so is our ability to manage it with CDW.

The service helped when going to Azure because now there was a higher level of service availability. Then, with the proactive monitoring tools that CDW has in place, we were able to respond and improve our uptime.

We wanted to reduce our IT footprint at the company. We wanted a cloud solution, but we didn't really want to hire a lot of IT staff. So, we wanted someone to kind of monitor the cloud for us.

It is used all throughout our engineering project controls, IT, and some management.

We are using Microsoft Azure, and CDW manages that. We have an additional cloud system for a specific product, and that is managed by a third-party.

The service gives us peace of mind. If something was to occur after hours and we had some type of process running that was critical for a project, we know that they will take care of it if something catastrophic were to happen. There have been instances where the domain controller went down, then they quickly got it back up and running.

There have been instances where they have notified us that we didn't have something properly configured which could pose a security breach. They notified us, then we fixed it together. This provides us peace of mind. This is what it really boils down to, knowing that your systems are being protected, backed up, and monitored. You just want to ensure that you have all these things covered since it is easy for someone to overlook all the different types of security.

With CDW Managed Cloud Services, at first, we just wanted to get a quick jump-start on an anticipated project for new technology, but then it morphed into more of a service where we could be apprised of issues before they happen. We like that.

Our environment is mostly EC2 with a couple of RDS instances and maybe an FSx.

They take things off of our plate, and we don't need to have as many experts on staff for more services that are rapidly expanding in the cloud offering.

CDW provides managed services to support our infrastructure solution. I consider it important because I don't really want to have to hire a full AWS person. Being able to leverage that takes quite a bit of pressure off of our staff, which is already stretched thin.

CDW Managed Cloud Services freed up staff in our organization to work on other responsibilities. We were able to stand up service in AWS much more quickly than if we didn't have that. It brought down the ramp-up time for projects that we didn't know were coming. We have a small footprint, and it has saved around 15 hours per month.

Their managed services team knows that something is wrong before we do, and they let us know. They apprise us so that we can make a decision on what needs to be done. It keeps uptime.

They enable us to deploy infrastructure services at our pace and not be limited by the availability of resources. That was a part of the reason why we engaged them in the first place. It keeps things more stable.

We are 100% cloud-based. We had some applications that required a server, so we set up an Azure Cloud to handle those applications. CDW recommended their Managed Cloud Services. They helped us set it up, then monitor it, which has been a big help.

CDW Managed Cloud Services enables us to deploy infrastructure services at our pace, not being limited by the availability of resources. It provides us another team to review and monitor things for us. So, we can keep our team smaller as well as tap into a much larger pool of knowledge than what we have. 

CDW Managed Cloud Services provides managed services to support our infrastructure solution.

Time savings is kind of hard to quantify at this moment because we're a small organization. We do not need to hire someone full-time, where we would usually need someone 10 hours a week to look at some of this.

We needed an offsite backup storage location that was not tied to our network in the traditional sense of copying and pasting raw file data. We needed some sort of system to house our server backups, detached from our network, so that ransomware wouldn't be able to connect to it and infect it. External USB drives or network shares at other locations that we have, other schools, could still get infected by ransomware. That is why we wanted to do an AWS S3 bucket and dump our backups on it. We used CDWs Managed Cloud Services to get us connected with the S3 bucket. We now have our backups off-site there, and we don't have to worry about them.

We also wanted the ability to use high-end, extensive applications like graphic arts, video editing, and technical engineering—things like Autodesk and CAD—on low-performance machines. In particular, we wanted that ability for Chromebook because that is what we have for all our students. The idea was that if we were going to be in this COVID situation with half the kids at home and half in class, how could we give them the ability to work on their CAD projects at home and not be tethered to a lab? The other consideration was that we didn't want to spend double the money achieving that goal. So we asked ourselves, "Can we remove the labs and not replenish them with new, updated computers?"

We worked out the numbers and went with AWS AppStream so that we could utilize the Chromebooks that we were already purchasing for the students and they wouldn't need a lab. They could just sit down with the Chromebook, plug it into an external monitor, and get all the big-screen real estate using the power of AppStream to do their production.

We also put our fiber backbone upgrade out for bid, and CDW won it. That is the only infrastructure piece that we outsource because it's so expensive and labor-intensive; we just don't have time to do it. We use CDW Managed Services for that. In addition, we use CDW Managed Services for installations of things like our projectors. We had every classroom outfitted with a projector and mount, and CDW ran the wiring and hooked them all up.

CDW built things from the ground up for us. We didn't have to do a lot of the work to get all the foundational pieces in place. They did everything for us and then handed it off to us and showed us how to use it. We took it from there. That freed up a lot of our summer work time because we have a lot of other projects going on in the summer. Having CDW as a second team for us was helpful and saved us a lot of time. They made sure that things were set up correctly. They know the ins and outs of the security side of AWS and we don't. They made sure that all our ACLs were in place and correct. Everything they did really took a lot off our plate.

This kind of project would probably have taken us two weeks' worth of time in the summer, if we had done it ourselves. I was able to devote those two weeks to work on other things, like upgrading our firewalls and switches and access points, and prepping for the new students' Chromebooks that were coming in. I told CDW what we needed and they built it. They worked on it and they showed us how to use it and we just started using it. They handed us the keys.

Overall, what CDW does for us, results in weeks of time savings, collectively, over the summer. We do most of our work in the summer. We don't do any major projects during the school year. Over the three months of June, July, and August, they saved us about half of the time we would have had to spend on projects. That means a month and a half of our time was freed up. If we had to put projectors in every day, we wouldn't get anything else done.

We even had CWS Managed Cloud Services help us with some of the scripting, at the beginning of the year, to enable our students to access our AppStream, through our SAML app connection. We had to run some Python scripting to apply a certain URL to each of the students' user profiles in the Google Admin console. Without that, they wouldn't be able to click the SAML icon that I pushed to them and have it connect. I put a ticket in with CDW and gave them access to a temporary Google admin account. They went in and exported all the student info and ran the script against it. I didn't have to worry about it, and that was great.

CDW listened to what our needs were, looked at what our goals were, and worked with us to meet them. They came up with a clear-cut path and plan and they achieved it. They met all the goals.

We're an educational facility and CDW Managed Cloud Services has helped us create a remote lab platform where we can have students create and utilize multiple servers and networks, interconnect them, and perform their cybersecurity lab tasks in a virtual environment.

The number of individual student users will range from 10 all the way up to 60 at a time.

The biggest benefit is the cost-effectiveness of this service. For us to house and implement this type of environment on site, we would have to employ a number of additional people, as well as additional technologies, and that would cost us two to three times what it's costing us by implementing it in the cloud.