SUMMER 2020 ISSUE
+
TELEHEALTH:
BEFORE AND AFTER How are they thinking differently? 64
Working Together
TAKES MORE THAN TOOLS 24
The Future of
Business
In a Post-COVID World 12
4 Ways
to Plan a
SAFE Return to School 70
The Power of an
INNOVATIVE Supply Chain 34
Table of Contents
Letter From the Editor
Editorial Hot IT Tools That You Should Be on the Lookout for The Role of Real-Time Data in a Return to Public Life
4
Editor-in-chief
8
Amy Protexter
The Future of Business in a Post-COVID World Through the Eyes of a CEO
12
Ransomware Threats Are Real. How Are You Reducing Risk?
20
The Future of Workplace Collaboration
24
Automation: Infrastructure Deployment
30
Innovation and the Future of the IT Supply Chain
34
IT Vendor Consolidation: An Essential Initiative for Today's Businesses
38
CxO Corner: Francine Katsoudas, Cisco's EVP and Chief People Officer
42
Responding to Change Through Rapid Digital Transformation
48
Case Study: Insight Turns to Its Connected Platform to Return Teammates Safely to Work
54
Checkpoint: Welcome to the Future of Cybersecurity
58
Hybrid IT Partnerships – Critical to Business Continuity
60
How Remote Patient Care Though Telehealth Is Quickly Gaining Traction
64
4 Ways to Prepare for Back to School 2020
70
Financial Flexibility Afforded by Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP) Agreement
74
Trending Tech: The Best of the Best IT Products for Productivity, Collaboration, Augmentation and More
78
Maintaining Meaningful Connections From a Distance
Production Managers Megan Hayes Maria Mahanes
Naomi Maraviles Sil Suelto
Editors Emily Allender Kellie Herson Heather Horn Michael LoCicero Krista Leland
Jesse Millard Jillian Sloan Isabel Ticlo Ashlee Thomason Heather Wagner
Contributing Writers Grant Asplund Elliot Baretz Kristopher Blasi Andrew Casey Brian Cea Andrew Conner Jeff Dodge David Downs Joseph Flynn
Paul Harrold Matt Jackson Ken Lamneck Brian Louderback Tunde Odeleye Daniel Schneider Lawrence Sellers Scott Walters Jamie Werve
Video calls have been an invaluable tool to mimic in-person interactions during our new work-from-home environment — but it’s not enough. We’re discovering that ‘connection’ has a higher level of meaning during this time when we may be craving a human connection that’s a little harder to come by. As such, we’ve recognized the need to maintain meaningful connections between our organization and our teammates, clients and partners to protect the strong company culture and bonds we’ve worked so hard to build. We’ve turned physical challenges into opportunities by staying connected via frequent virtual whiteboarding sessions, team huddles and one-to-one meetings; hosting virtual happy hours with teammates and clients; and offering online wellness activities like meditation and yoga. The future of business will be highly digital and often virtual. It’s up to us to transform physical and digital barriers into bridges and ensure distance doesn’t make us distant. In this issue of the Tech Journal, we’ve taken great care to address the next question on every IT leader’s mind: what now? And while we can only make educated predictions, we’re certain one thing won’t change: the value of human connections.
Design Art Director Chris Reddoch
Art Production Managers Charles Cruz
By now, you’ve probably attended your fair share of virtual meetings interrupted by dogs barking or kids yelling in the background, a speaker forgetting to take themselves off mute, an attendee forgetting that they’re not on mute, and many other technical and human blunders that we’ve all graciously accepted for the moment.
We hope you find these articles and stories helpful in your quest to manage today — and prepare for a new way forward.
Rovi Sia
Creative Designers Chancel Gonzales Mervin Lorenzo Katherine Magpantay Emerson Marchan
Angelie Perez Beata Sanchez Anthony Urbano Kurt Venzon
Amy Protexter
SVP, North America Marketing at Insight
t T ols 4
Hot Hot IT IT Tools That You Should Be on the Lookout for
In terms of technology that can make life easier and organizations run more smoothly, this is a very exciting time. Here are some of the leading software out in the market that are making work-from-home operations secure, data more visible and website experiences engaging. If you’re an IT director or just personally invested in IT, there’s bound to be several interesting new tidbits for you to consider in this list.
5
Hot IT Tools
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Cloud backup Protect Microsoft 365® and G Suite data with secure cloud-to-cloud backup, making regulatory compliance a breeze.
Businesses worldwide are looking to digital as a competitive differentiator. IT is the catalyst in these efforts, wielding technology to successfully deliver new experiences and business models. Be the innovation engine your company needs while still delivering the flawless service it depends on. Progress offers a suite of incredibly reliable solutions that are designed to help you do reliably incredible work so you can take charge in this fast moving digital climate.
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Progress DataDirect
Data connectivity solutions
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Get complete control over file transfer activities, ensuring the reliability of core business processes and the secure and compliant transfer of sensitive data.
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Learn more at insight.com/acronis 6
7
The Role of
Real-Time Data
in a Return to Public Life A look at the technologies and policies shaping the future of both the public and private sector
F
rom our city streets to national parks, public spaces across the United States look much different today than they did just a few months ago. Many remain closed or empty while others have been drastically altered in the wake of the ongoing fight against COVID-19. While focus has largely been centered around business and economic impacts, there have been equal if not added implications in the public sector. School districts are having to rapidly scale distance learning solutions. The closure of state motor vehicle authorities and courthouses has meant basic civil services from driver’s licenses to divorce filings have been suspended, and unemployment departments remain overwhelmed by unprecedented demands. Across the country, Americans are understandably eager for a return to normal. But the reality is, until both testing and vaccinations are readily available, public life will have to continue to look a little different than what we’re used to. As a result, leaders in both the private and public sector face some challenging decisions around when and how to begin reopening in a way that protects public health — and what role technology will play in enabling this shift.
8
9
A data-driven dilemma Not far from where I live, the city of Westport, Connecticut recently made headlines with their participation in a Draganfly drone pilot program. Following models outlined in Australia, the drone was equipped with cameras designed to not only regulate social distancing, but also to aid in early detection by monitoring temperatures, heart rates and respiratory rates from a distance of up to 190 feet. After initial excitement about the potential for a return to public life, the program was quickly shut down — not as a result of technical failure, but due to privacy concerns from citizens. This is an extreme example, but it offers a valuable snapshot of the types of discussions we face in the coming months and years. We have the technology readily available to regulate social distancing, remotely monitor symptoms and conduct extensive contact tracing. But, particularly in the public sector, the conversation quickly becomes one not of ability, but responsibility. Fortunately, a wide range of technologies and approaches are available to help agencies and organizations manage data in a way that helps protect public health while respecting individual privacy.
No-data, low-data approaches By now, most of us have grown accustomed to seeing lines of tape on the floor or plexiglass dividers at service windows. In addition to these no-tech or lowtech tactics for social distancing, many have begun to explore the possibility of staggered scheduling. Others are discussing requirements for masks or daily temperature checks at managed points of entry. But these manual and often time-consuming precautions represent a challenge, both from the perspective of bandwidth and reliance on social responsibility. To be effective, these solutions must be rigorous and consistent enough to re-instill confidence in the general public. This is where data-driven technologies offer some clear benefits. Within the private sector, many organizations have already announced plans to eliminate the act of waiting in line altogether in favor of mobile alerts. A similar approach could easily transform the way we visit government buildings like the Post Office or Department of Motor Vehicles. For those areas where foot traffic is necessary, newly developed “smart cones” and wristbands offer a way to help anonymously guide social distancing by leveraging machine vision to measure spacing and provide notifications on crowd density. 10
The good news is, there are experts and frameworks to help make this possible. With a strategic, socially responsible approach, we have the opportunity to not only rise to this challenge, but also to lay the foundation for smarter, safer, cleaner public life in the future.
“ We have the technology readily available to regulate social distancing, remotely monitor symptoms and conduct extensive contact tracing.”
Build a data-driven strategy for detection and prevention. Explore the technologies enabling a safe return to work.
More data, more visibility In close working environments, other data-driven approaches can help measure policy compliance. Working with GOJO, makers of Purell, our team has helped design smart hand sanitizer stations which use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) scanners to track average or individual usage. Basic object-detection models can be deployed using security cameras to monitor crowd size or identify the presence of face masks without registering identity. In larger areas, thermal detection is proving a powerful tool for instilling the confidence needed for people to move about more freely. Positioned alongside security cameras or metal detectors at fixed entry points, scanners are able to quickly and non-invasively check for elevated temperature or other flu-like symptoms. This data can then be flagged for response or logged for regulatory purposes without the need to associate or store any personally identifiable information.
Insight’s Connected Platform earns three honorable mentions in Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Idea Awards High-tech, high-potential solutions Where the true power of data comes into its own is through contact tracing. Experts agree the viral spread is simply too fast to be controlled by manual tracing alone. Leveraging data to identify, educate and monitor those who have come into contact with the virus
provides the visibility to contain the outbreak without the need for mass quarantine. South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have already successfully deployed opt-in models with apps that combine location tracking, Bluetooth® and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to track and alert users to the spread of infection. Similar measures are actively being explored in Canada and across the European Union, and back in April, Apple and Google announced a joint effort to launch a secure, private and transparent solution for use in the United States. Ultimately the more data we have available, the more quickly and safely we can return to public life. But what are the implications for policy, infrastructure and the future of our towns and cities?
Defining the future through digital transformation Though the conversation around privacy and safety will continue to evolve, on the whole we’re seeing a rapid acceptance of the role of technology in building smarter, safer public spaces. Foundationally, modern towns and cities are already in transition, becoming more digital every day and integrating more technology as they go. Even before the recent shifts, planning committees were beginning to integrate more intelligent networks into municipal plans — from smart streets and traffic lights to security cameras. As the public and private sector work to define our new normal, it will be critical for both sides to take a long-term view, considering how the technologies and policies we implement now will shape everyday life even beyond the immediate need. Robust security strategies will need to be factored into every project at every stage. Considerations will also have to be taken to prevent bias or discrimination in data models.
About the Author Jeff Dodge
Director of National Solutions for Digital Innovation, Insight
Tips for embracing transformation in the public & private sector: Think ahead. Don’t wait for funding or policy to start planning for a new normal.
Lead with security. Integrate encryption and other protocols at every level.
Prioritize privacy. Limit the use of personally identifiable information to necessity.
anage people, process M and technology. Take a holistic approach to ensure successful change.
Start small. Plan to deploy solutions internally then scale up to public services.
Think long term. Invest in and maintain solutions that will provide long-term value. 11
The Future of Business
in a Post-COVID World Through the
Eyes of a CEO If we had told our clients in January that in a few weeks we’d all be working from home, they would have laughed and told us there was no way that was going to work.
I
think most people are amazed at what they can do when push comes to shove — and there‘s no doubt that all of us got shoved, hard.
Those first few weeks of lockdown were pretty ugly. That might have been because so many of us were working long days and nights, trying to solve problems we never thought we’d have. I’d turn on a sports show and cringe at the makeshift home setup and inconsistent connectivity, not to mention the complete lack of sports activity to talk about. But within a few days or weeks they figured it out, as did many others. Call centers moved to homes, professional services pivoted to video consultations and so on.
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13
The rush to respond is over — take a breath.
Digital innovation doesn’t have to entail wholly disruptive, throw-everything-away-and-start-over experiences. On the contrary, innovation happens in increments, iterations and pivots demanded by what’s happening in the world.
It’s clear now that most of the quick adjustments we had to make as temporary solutions aren’t going to be temporary. There will be residual impacts that affect not just how we do business, but also our general outlook toward the world.
Working together with some of our partners, we adapted this framework to create our Connected Platform for Detection and Prevention, leveraging smart technologies and sensors to support measures for social distancing, sanitation and more. By building on an existing concept, we’ve been able to rapidly develop and deploy a new solution that’s helping us — and our clients — overcome the next set of challenges: bringing people back to workplaces and public spaces, safely.
I remember my grandparents talking about the Great Depression and what their families went through. It stayed with that whole generation and changed their outlook on the world quite a bit. It’s why my grandmother would spoon leftover mashed potatoes from the dinner plates into a Tupperware — you didn’t let food go to waste. Following generations would face their own lifealtering crises: 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008 and now, COVID-19. Each event reshaped our society. Faced with different challenges each time, we adapted and embraced new solutions and lifestyles, from rideshares to Millennialfriendly investing tools. With the impacts of COVID-19, we experienced a strange dichotomy. Almost overnight, everything closed up and our busy lives came to a screeching halt. But simultaneously, imperceptibly, so many things accelerated. The upward trendlines for adopting work-from-home options, the cloud, e-commerce, telehealth — and so much more — all skyrocketed. For years we’ve been steadily driving toward the future of business. And then quite suddenly, ready or not, we’re here.
When COVID-19 forced new business models and working remotely, how long did employees experience any downtime while your organization adapted IT systems and processes? No downtime
24%
Less than 1 week
28%
1-2 weeks
28%
3-4 weeks 5-6 weeks
4%
7-8 weeks
4%
Still figuring it out 14
11%
2%
People first, digital second I’ve been an executive sponsor for many of our Insight clients. Building and maintaining meaningful relationships meant that I was often on an airplane, flying around the country for in-person meetings. While those in-person connections are invaluable, the amount of time spent traveling is considerable. Transitioning to collaboration technologies and video formats has allowed me to continue those connections and, in some cases, made it even easier and more frequent. What’s been interesting to experience is the widespread use of video. Previously, I’d often have phone conversations with clients — many of them weren’t even equipped for video calls. But now that they’ve been forced to adopt digital channels, our phone calls have been replaced with video calls, which make those conversations all the more personal. There’s no question that in a post-COVID world, all businesses will need to start moving to a more digital way of operating. Technology will certainly be at the forefront as we begin to bring workers back safely. At the onset of the pandemic, Insight’s digital innovation experts recognized an immediate need for creative technology solutions to help organizations sustain productivity while ensuring employee health and safety. Our teams had already developed a flexible Internet of Things (IoT) Connected Platform used to help our clients gain a unified view of their data from a wide range of devices and sensors. We tailored this technology to function across a variety of use cases — from restaurants leveraging sensors to monitor equipment and prevent food spoilage to school campuses applying sound triangulation and automated alerts to enhance safety communications. A global health risk certainly created a new challenge — but the solution didn’t need to be built from scratch.
Top technologies companies plan to invest in to help expedite a return to normalcy:
58%
36%
Smart, personal hygiene devices
Contactless sensors
36%
35%
Smartphone tracking
Contact or no-contact infrared thermometers
That being said, not all workers will be shutting down their home office any time soon. The workforce is poised to be increasingly hybrid with workforces either splitting time between home and the office or continuing with groups of workers entirely remote. Workers seeking remote flexibility may see more employer options — but they also face greater competition now that businesses can recruit top talent beyond the limits of proximity while also eliminating relocation expenses. The right talent for a job is more readily available when it can be accomplished remotely.
The future of business isn’t just about where work gets done, but also how. Remote services — particularly for IT — isn’t a new idea, but like so many other IT trends, you can expect a rampant increase and expansion in this area.
The future of business isn’t just about where work gets done, but also how. In today’s uncertain environment, we’re already seeing some of the challenges of on-site work by outside vendors. Although this moment in time is unique, there’s still a growing desire to build capabilities that allow for work to be conducted remotely. The future of IT includes increased zero-touch deployment, IT selfservice and hybrid IT teams made up of both internal (on-site) and contractual (remote) professionals. Other businesses should examine their service offerings and look for ways where technology can facilitate remote work. For example, physical equipment inspections could be replaced by IoT sensors that automatically report anomalies. On the other end of the spectrum, we’re witnessing substantial adoption and advancements in telehealth. In fact, Forrester projects virtual health visits will top one billion this year.
Bring your people with you during change. The abrupt changes every business had to make no doubt exposed a number of vulnerabilities you may have been blind to, from an insufficient Business Continuity Plan (BCP) to security gaps. You might have also discovered that the tools and software investments you’ve made aren’t being maximized due to a lack of training and/or adoption by end users. Effective Organizational Change Management (OCM) is a critical component for successful digital transformation. What’s clear now is that OCM can’t be limited to digital transformation alone. One of our survey respondents admitted, “While we’ve made a lot of cloud collaboration software available to our organization, many users were not using it regularly or well-trained with it. We need to be more proactive and work on enforcing education on new software we roll out to ensure our staff is able to use it seamlessly.” 15
The reality is, you can’t drop people into a new experience or equip them with new tools and expect them to know how to thrive. Working from home seems like a simple enough transition, once you get the technical requirements out of the way. However, organizations are finding out it takes more than technology to help people be effective. And this isn’t limited to individuals mastering collaboration tools. Many of us have never had to manage teams from a distance, and that requires a different set of soft skills. Here are some considerations we’ve asked ourselves along the way: • H ow do we support our people to be successful working from home? • How do we train people to be effective managers over remote teams? • How do you support your teams and ensure work/life balance? • How do you measure productivity or accountability? • And, most importantly, how do you make sure people feel connected to other teammates and to the company? At Insight, we’re fortunate to have OCM solutions built into our business. We have teammates who specialize in remote training and learning. Because of this, we were able to make resources readily available for our teams. That’s a unique ability. Most organizations don’t have that skill set in-house, but it’s worth the time investment to seek out those resources to ensure your employees have the proper skills and training to do their job well.
How do you manage today while preparing for a new way forward? We reacted to the impacts of COVID-19 because we had to. Now, it’s time to reflect. Take a beat and ask some tough questions. We did it, but did we do it the right way? Or the best way? Did we cover security gaps? Did we overspend in areas because we had to make quick decisions, and now are we able to review those choices and optimize?
65% of IT leaders cited business continuity planning or the ability to work remotely as their biggest lesson learned from the impact of COVID-19. A mere 13% of IT leaders felt their organization was “extremely prepared” to handle IT business changes when COVID-19 arose, and when asked how prepared they feel now to handle a similar crisis in the future, only 20.5% say “extremely prepared." Which tells us one thing: There’s still a lot of work to be done.
Protect your business today.
First and foremost is the well-being of your teammates and their families. Secondarily, turn your focus to your client base and assess how well you’re supporting them and their changing needs. Once you have those two focus points addressed, look at the business as a whole. You might have had to make, or are still making, hard decisions to address the financial health of your organization. Make sure your company is protected now while also being prepared for opportunities that are waiting on the other side. Don’t jump to the point where you cut out any potential to grow when this climate of uncertainty does change — because it will. Put yourself in a position for rebound. Focus on security. Some companies have learned the hard way that as you become more remote, you open yourself up for more security risks. Cybercrime is at an all-time high. When business is financially threatened, it’s tempting to scale back on solutions and services — security isn’t the place to make rollbacks. The financial risks of a cyberattack far outweigh the potential savings. In the weeks following our teams moving fully remote, we scrutinized our own security posture and continued to roll out new or tightened security measures. We also send regular security training and reminders to our teammates to stay vigilant.
Orient to digital.
The world will be, without question, more digital. I don’t think anyone, or any company, will ever regret becoming more digitally focused and oriented. If and when you can invest in digital innovation, do, because you can bet your competition will. In the IT space, we beat the eminency of disruption like a drum. Continuously innovate is our mantra, because it’s the only way to ensure resiliency. Challenges invoke tremendous creativity — but once a great idea gets noticed, it will get copied. Stay nimble and prepared to innovate around every corner. To that end, prioritize a modern infrastructure. Digital transformation can’t happen on outdated hardware. There are cost effective ways to modernize your technology environment, including financing arrangements or subscription models to avoid large capital investments. Take advantage of the public cloud, which provides a lot of flexibility and agility. During the swift transition to work from home, many organizations turned to the cloud to get things up and running very quickly. We were among them. Insight is a global company and we
had teammates in Manila who were not equipped to work remotely. In fact, they didn’t even have laptops. So when our IT teams in the U.S. needed to quickly get those teammates up and running — securely — we employed a Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution. This was very simple for us to do from a vantage point of doing it in the cloud first.
Final thoughts We should all be proud of what we were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. We’re certainly proud of our teams at Insight; they were able to solve challenges to quickly get our own teammates set up remotely while simultaneously helping our clients overcome a plethora of roadblocks to do the same. Everyone had the rug pulled out from beneath them. Acknowledge the work, the hard choices, the flexibility and dexterity from teammates, the graciousness and trust from clients and customers — together, we’ll emerge stronger on the other side.
Find out how other company IT departments responded to COVID-19 in our special report, The Insight 2020 Intelligent Technology Pulse: The Impact of COVID-19 on Business Readiness.
About the Author Ken Lamneck
President and Chief Executive Officer, Insight
Enable an elastic workforce.
Even after employees return to the workplace, for many industries, remote work will perdure. It requires the right collaboration platform, secure remote access points, proper equipment and special training (as we discovered).
Make sure your company is protected now while also being prepared for opportunities that are waiting on the other side. 16
If and when employees do return to work, they need to have confidence that they’re returning to a safe, protected and healthy environment. Don’t cut corners when it comes to employee health and safety. To the best of your abilities, plan for an elastic workforce that allows workers the flexibility to work from anywhere. In this moment, we’re focused on remote work as a solution to the global pandemic, but the reality is that working from home is a great solution for many other uncontrollable situations, such as extreme weather, high pollution advisories or allowing parents to stay home with a sick child.
Securing your journey to the cloud Workload security for AWS®, Azure® and other cloud environments No matter which cloud provider you use, you need additional protection for what you put IN the cloud. Trend Micro™ Deep Security™, powered by XGen™ security uses a blend of cross-generational threat defense techniques to protect cloud workloads from breaches and accelerate compliance. Learn more
How Do You Manage Today and Prepare for a New Way Forward? We’ll help you build, implement and manage IT solutions that propel your business for digital success — because preparing for the future of business takes Insight. Detect and prevention solutions By leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence, we can help you detect symptoms and prevent the spread of disease to create healthier and safer public spaces.
Cloud and data center platforms Build a modern IT environment that drives business value through agility and optimized performance.
Managed workplace services Keep end users engaged and productive with the freedom and support to work anywhere, anytime.
Product lifecycle management From procurement to asset disposition, we’re here to help you save time, resources and headaches at every phase.
Insight is proud to be a Fortune 500 company. insight.com
Being an IT security professional today is a hugely complicated job.
M
ost attention is paid to simply keeping the lights on, as opposed to trying to anticipate what threats the business could be exposed to. But threat vectors are increasing, as is the scale and severity of cyberattacks. Among the concerns is ransomware.
It's important to remember that, in security, we like to say,
“It’s not a matter of if, but when.” The key is minimizing the degree to which an attacker can move through your IT environment and cause damage that’s difficult to undo. When looking at what your organization can do to mitigate the risk of a devastating ransomware attack, there are several ways to make meaningful improvements.
Endpoint security According to the New York Times,
205,280 Organizations submitted files that had been hacked in a ransomware attack in 2019.
Ransomware Threats Are Real. How are you reducing your risk?
Prevention is far less taxing than recovering from a security attack. Explore several ways to prevent ransomware and mitigate its impacts.
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41%
increase from the year before
The costs to respond to such an attack and the harm that can be done are difficult to quantify, but the impacts are profound.
This is basically ground zero. The endpoint is generally more important than your firewalls or your network, particularly given the prevalence of cloud and web application usage. Choosing an effective endpoint solution is critical. Not all endpoint security solutions are created equal. Take a look at publicly available ratings and testing criteria. Then, make sure the solution is properly implemented and being used to its full extent. Sometimes this requires engaging a third party to get the specific expertise you need.
Active directory management There have been countless examples of malicious actors leveraging group policies and other features within Active Directory® to launch and scale a ransomware attack. An attacker can linger in your environment for weeks and months, using lateral movement to take down recovery controls, destroy your backups and wreak other forms of havoc. Monitoring password changes, group policies and anything related to privileged accounts are ways you can identify suspicious behavior before things get out of hand.
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Workstation isolation If you look at general network communication, we typically have workstations or servers talking to server resources and the cloud. So, the question is, “Is there ever any reason why they should talk to each other, workstation to workstation?” When attackers infiltrate an environment, patient zero is compromised, but the next thing the attacker is going to do is move laterally to exploit vulnerabilities from one workstation to another. By isolating the workstation, so that it only trusts server resources, you’ve removed the opportunity for lateral movement. This makes containment a lot easier.
Vulnerability management This is about more than identifying vulnerabilities. Ransomware prevention efforts are most successful
“I think one of the reasons why a lot of folks don’t use a technique like workstation isolation is because they’re worried there’s a lot of background protocols and such … they don’t want to break anything.” - Insight Practice Director Jason Rader
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when there’s a defined process for assessing vulnerabilities and remediating them on a continuous basis. This can be done relatively inexpensively, but the IT team has to be dedicated to it. Tasks include, but aren’t limited to, patching and configuration. At a higher level, vulnerability management can also play an important role in measuring the overall risk profile of a business. Such information can be crucial during M&A discussions, business valuations and strategic activities.
Multifactor Authentication (MFA) Despite the fact that this technology has existed for many years now, a surprising number of organizations have not adopted it. Plenty of security solutions include it as a feature, but it may not be enabled and in use.
A general rule of thumb is: If it’s externally facing and/ or a SaaS-based solution,
MFA should be in place. Using MFA can go a long way in preventing the spread of a ransomware attack by restricting access to sensitive assets and systems. CRM and email platforms should have MFA controlling access, as should any privileged account.
To learn more about this topic, check out our whitepaper about how to protect your business from ransomware. About the Author Tunde Odeleye
Director of Penetration Testing Services for Cloud + Data Center Transformation, Insight
The Future of
Workplace
Collaboration
C
ollaboration solutions have been a valuable business aid in recent years — providing more flexibility, agility and productivity to workers on the go. And, now, these videoconferencing, instant messaging and content sharing tools are quickly becoming a business continuity necessity as we navigate the impacts of COVID-19. Applications like Microsoft Teams® and Cisco Webex® make it just as effective to complete tasks away from the office by unifying voice, video, instant messaging and content sharing in a single platform. It’s now possible to complete a full day of work on the go from any device. You can still attend meetings and accomplish tasks from your home or on the move between appointments. All that’s required is a stable and secure internet connection. Busy schedules can be easily accommodated, business travel can be more productive, and job and candidate pools are larger since you’re no longer limited to opportunities in one location. Physical offices are changing, too. Businesses are adopting open concepts where desks are optional and conference rooms are in abundance to enable fluid work environments.
COVID-19 definitely pushed the need for a holistic collaboration solution to the forefront, so remote workers can engage and collaborate better. According to an analysis of 2018 U.S. Census Bureau data by Global Workplace Analytics, remote work has grown 173% since 2005 with five million U.S. workers working from home at least half the time. Collaboration solutions have become a critical component of most business continuity strategies to safeguard communities, workers and customers from the COVID-19 virus.
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Transitioning to the new normal For the last several years, voice and video solutions have been a staple. Content collaboration, though, hasn’t been as popular. “Businesses were stuck with email or their shared drive,” says Joseph Flynn, director of services for Insight's Connected Workforce team. “Many organizations want content collaboration, but IT seemed to delay it. There was no value from an IT infrastructure or technology perspective.” When stay-at-home orders went into effect around the globe, content collaboration and sharing solution demand grew. Many organizations had little time to create and execute strategies that would ensure their workforce could continue everyday tasks outside the office — leaving many in need of finding out how to adopt these tools. COVID-19 pushed the need for a holistic collaboration solution to the forefront, so remote workers can engage and collaborate better. Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams have risen in usage since the shift to remote work. “Zoom meeting” also quickly entered the cultural vernacular as schools, families and businesses adopted the solution. Thanks to these tools, social distancing doesn’t mean you can’t be social both personally and professionally. Collaboration solutions help employees stay engaged with their colleagues and are useful in ensuring projects are finished like they were done in the office.
Users will start to use more advanced features. And from there, they’ll start automating their own day-to-day tasks to make their jobs easier.
Although integrating these solutions is easier than ever, the sprawling nature of the tools pose a unique challenge. How do you maximize value while maintaining your IT environment’s best practices? Collaboration solutions don’t exist in a silo. They inherently bring people and their data together — requiring involvement from many business and IT units, including security, data, network, executive and human resources teams. Your organization must establish governance policies that ensure regulatory compliance and employees require best practices training to ensure an effective adoption.
Driving value with collaboration This new era of holistic collaboration solution adoption is going to bring many changes to both the way we work and the tools themselves. Your end users — even the ones who might have resisted the adoption of your collaboration solution — will quickly become super users. Users will start to tackle more advanced features. And from there, they’ll start automating their day-to-day tasks to make their jobs easier. As we assess the impact of this global work-fromhome environment, many organizations may come to realize that remote work is equal to office work, if not better. The face of offices could change even more as businesses determine the perfect mix of in-office and remote workers. Business travel could be less of a priority, too, because it’s much easier and cost-effective to hop on a video call than fly long distances for a day or two of work.
This level of flexibility will lead to less travel time, which will drive more opportunity for productivity and customer interactions. Providing collaboration solutions will no longer be a perk to highlight. It’s going to be an expectation from your end users, customers and the public.
Building a best-fit collaboration tool with an eye to the future Organizations that quickly adopted new solutions in response to COVID-19 may need to take a step back and assess the success of their adoption. They’ll need to ask a few important questions: • Is this tool contributing to short- and long-term business success? • Are employees using these tools appropriately and responsibly? • Are the right data security policies in place? If the answers to those questions aren’t satisfactory, then adjustments need to be made by changing existing licenses or finding a new solution altogether. When making these changes, business requirements should be the number one driver of change. Working with a technology partner can help ensure your organization integrates and adopts a collaboration platform that meets all its needs and goals. When Insight works with clients, every project starts with an assessment.
You’ll need to clearly communicate the value of these tools while also providing use-case training to support a successful adoption. This can be done by establishing an organizational change management strategy that engages your end users. From there, the benefits of modern collaboration solutions will start to appear.
Enable your remote workforce. We’ll help you implement and adopt a best-fit collaboration solution that improves connectivity, productivity and flexibility.
About the Author Paul Harrold
Director Professional Services for Connected Workforce, Insight With special contribution from Joseph Flynn
Video-first, unified Communications Learn more
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A team reviews existing contracts and licensing and then compares capabilities with short- and long-term organizational goals. A hunt for a new solution begins if the existing licensing isn’t providing the capabilities the organization needs or doesn’t use. When an ideal solution is found, it’s time to create a proof of concept to ensure the solution will work as expected within the customer’s IT environment. Then, the project goes to a pilot program before being fully implemented. But an adoption doesn’t end there. In some cases, integrating the technology is the easy part. There’s a challenge in making sure your users are happy with the solution and will use it. If a workforce doesn’t like the solution and won’t use it, there’s a problem. Not only are you wasting money on a tool no one uses, but you can run into situations where employees download unapproved applications.
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Automation: Infrastructure Deployment Get more from the cloud through automation.
B
ut does this really matter if business outcomes aren’t being realized? Cloud spend and governance remain key challenges for organizations, and this is indicative of the gap between an IT infrastructure strategy and the subsequent need for successful execution. To achieve agility and speed — what every business needs to compete effectively — IT organizations must start by using modernized approaches for infrastructure and application deployment. Operation leaders should consider simplifying processes and embracing intelligent automation for low-value, repetitive tasks. The manual stand-up of networking, storage, compute, firewall and load-balancing can be a lengthy, error-prone and generally difficult process. In numerous scenarios, dollars and time are wasted, and silos are created that have long-lasting impacts.
Modernize your approach. Many of today’s IT organizations are using cloud technologies.
84%
58%
84% of them have a multicloud strategy.
58% have a hybrid strategy.
Furthermore, most IT organizations prioritize a healthy mix of public and private clouds, according to the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report. This is good news, considering that a hybrid cloud strategy seems to be an indicator of faster IT transformation.
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Automating initial deployments can bring substantial Return on Investment (ROI) through quicker provisioning and recovery, simpler updates and changes, and fewer remediations.
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Introducing
PowerStore The future of storage
Similarly, IT process/runbook automation can deliver value throughout implementation and support cloud migration. A closely related topic to infrastructure automation is ongoing configuration management, which is essentially a way to automate validation and control configuration drift.
Standalone tools are good in that they aim to solve specific problems, but implementation often only masks bigger problems. What’s the answer? You must use automation skillfully and decisively. • How are those big problems solved?
When well-designed, a configuration management system can drive significant ROI by automating operational support, security and audit compliance. In the whitepaper, “Automation: The Key to a Successful Hybrid Cloud,” we describe how layered automation can help take a hybrid cloud strategy from design through implementation and initial/ongoing configuration. But while many automation tool sets now exist to automate infrastructure deployment and configuration (e.g. AWS® CloudFormation, Ansible®, Terraform®) these standalone offerings often fall short. 32
• Which tools would be most useful? • Which IT and business managers should be involved in each stage of deployment?
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• What timelines are realistic and provide the most business value?
intelligent infrastructure.
• What integrations should be planned for? • What’s the proper order of automated tasks?
Seeking the help of experts can ensure you ask the right questions upfront and avoid pitfalls later on.
To learn more about this topic, check out our whitepaper about automating with hybrid cloud.
About the Author Andrew Conner
DATA-CENTRIC DESIGN
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Learn more at insight.com/DellEMCPowerStore.
Innovation and the Future of the
IT Supply Chain
T
he term “digital transformation” is everywhere. In fact, for the last several years, there’s been a lot of discussion in the IT space about the need to transform business for the future. Until recently, “the future” may have seemed like a fairly vague concept. It was something businesses felt they had plenty of time to prepare for themselves. But if 2020 has taught us anything so far, it’s that “the future” is here. The time to transform is now. The real question is: How do you make digital transformation a reality? Right now, companies are struggling to, as my team likes to put it, “keep the lights on.” In other words, they’re zoned in on the day-to-day operations that keep the business running. And when day-to-day operations take up most of your time and most of your budget, how can you possibly focus on — or invest in — anything else? The truth is, in order to focus on digital transformation projects, businesses must first innovate within their existing IT supply chains. Only then can they free up internal resources to concentrate on new initiatives.
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A different kind of innovation
Data. Data. Data.
Effective integration
When you imagine IT innovation, you probably think of concepts like smart cities, connected devices, groundbreaking applications and so on. But innovation doesn’t just mean artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things (IoT).
Data is probably the biggest pain point for businesses right now.
Many businesses are already invested in tools meant to help make purchasing more automated or asset management easier. The problem is that these tools aren’t often synced into one, cohesive system.
When it comes to IT supply chains, innovation means embracing concepts like consolidation, automation and integration. It means streamlining traditional, manual and clunky processes. It means bringing these technologies into the 21st century.
Embracing automation There are huge opportunities for companies to leverage the power of automation in their IT supply chains. There are still a lot of businesses out there that employ almost entirely manual procurement processes. Employees are still forced to create a physical purchase order, then track down the correct approval person for a signature. If they’ve asked for a brand or style of product that’s not approved by the business, they’re forced to go back and start from the beginning. That’s a lot of time and a lot of effort just to get the right product on the purchase order. Then the company has to go through the next series of steps, such as verifying that the employee has business justification and that all the appropriate data elements are included in the order. With the technology available today, this process could be entirely automated. Instead of creating orders by hand, the employee could be going to a customized e-procurement portal where they see only preapproved products and can put in an order with a few clicks of their mouse. Imagine the time saved (and by extension, the costs cut) by removing all that back-and-forth from the process. Imagine knowing, from the beginning, your employees will only be able to order pre-approved products. Imagine approvals for that order being automatically routed to the correct approver. Even within the simple workstream of buying a new piece of hardware, getting an invoice and knowing who to charge back internally, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for companies to increase their efficiency.
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And it’s not just about getting the right kind of data, it’s about having the ability to synthesize that data and build meaningful views in order to make informed business decisions. It’s also often not just about finding ways to optimize. Many businesses struggle with simply understanding the current state of their environment. Innovating within the IT supply chain hinges on a business’s ability to see all their data. And it’s imperative that this data is in the right place at the right time so decision-makers can look at it from every angle and make the right decisions about the future of the business.
Data is probably the biggest pain point for businesses right now.
Add in the aforementioned difficulties with getting the right data in the right place at the right time, and you’ve got a serious problem. When trying to make data-driven decisions, disparate systems only serve to muddy the waters. Proper integration gives businesses the ability to get all the data points they need to make effective business decisions. To achieve this integration, companies should lean on a knowledgeable partner that will take a deliberate approach to integration. If there’s one thing that’s worse than incongruent systems, it’s a hastily stood up solution that’s faulty at best. Which leads me to my final point.
The importance of vendor consolidation To achieve the optimization and automation that businesses desire — and, frankly, need — they have to consolidate vendors. When trying to take a thoughtful approach to integration or introduce less manual processes, companies simply can’t afford to have vendor sprawl. They need a deeper level partnership and an expansive portfolio of technology solutions in order to be successful in their transformation. When vetting potential IT partners, focus on finding an organization with the capabilities to help you not only achieve today’s goals, but also the ability to scale with your business as it grows. It’s equally as important to find a partner that takes the time to understand your business driver and what you’re trying to achieve. Anyone can come in and install another expensive tool. You need a partner that thoughtfully designs solutions with your end goal in mind. That’s why Insight coined the term “super solution integrator.” This new breed of IT partner doesn’t just consult on the right solutions and bring order to disparate systems. We’re innovation experts who can manage the entire digital transformation process from end to end.
To achieve the optimization and automation that businesses desire — and, frankly, need — they have to consolidate vendors. The power of supply chain innovation The idea of an optimized supply chain isn’t a new concept. But the time to transform business is here — companies simply can’t afford to wait anymore. But innovation doesn’t only mean cutting-edge technology. In the case of IT supply chains, innovation means streamlining processes, integrating systems, leveraging data and utilizing the right kind of partner. And the power of an innovative supply chain is incredible. Optimizing this part of the business helps cut costs and increase efficiency so companies can focus on other digital transformation projects.
It’s time to get started. Supply chain innovation is a business necessity and Insight can help you get to an optimized state. We help our clients cut time and costs out of their procurement processes, simplify product lifecycle management and maximize your software investment.
Click here to read more on what we do in the supply chain space.
About the Author Jamie Werve
Director of E-commerce, Insight
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IT Vendor Consolidation:
An Essential Initiative for Today’s Businesses A strategic approach to procurement and vendor management isn’t only possible — it’s a necessity in today’s business landscape.
What is IT vendor consolidation?
What makes a good partner?
In the simplest terms, it’s reducing the number of vendors you procure
The right vendor is one with expertise and capabilities that span the entire IT ecosystem. When evaluating vendors, decision-makers should ask themselves:
products and services from. But really, IT vendor consolidation is a strategic business decision that can position the enterprise for growth. It ensures businesses have selected the right partners for the future.
How big is too big?
Why consolidate?
Today, large enterprises have sophisticated, sprawling IT ecosystems. Though necessary to achieve digital transformation, these environments often include a large vendor portfolio that only gets bigger as new IT initiatives are undertaken. Suddenly, you’ve got something that’s expensive to maintain and inefficient to operate.
The benefits of vendor consolidation are twofold: It optimizes daily operations and primes the business for growth. Fewer vendors mean fewer moving parts in the supply chain and an easier time gaining a holistic view of the environment, compliance and vendor performance. It also creates more robust relationships with those vendors, making them more strategic.
Today,
47% of enterprises are managing more than
10 38
vendor relationships.
By 2023,
40% of midsize enterprises will have a center of excellence for
IT procurement and vendor management.
Can this partner help us determine our strategic goals and build a roadmap to them? Does this partner have the expertise and/or end-to-end solutions we need? How can this partner help us automate and standardize our IT purchasing processes? Can we outsource key procurement and sourcing functions to this partner? Can this partner help us improve our reporting to support our decision-making? What kind of preferential treatment will we receive in exchange for consolidating with this partner?
It’s unrealistic to expect businesses to consolidate down to a single vendor, simply because there’s no one partner that could do it all. But the benefits of IT vendor consolidation are too great for enterprises to ignore. Learn more in this exclusive vendor consolidation whitepaper.
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How to avoid technology obsolescence while overcoming budget limitations Hardware leasing By leveraging software and maintenance multiyear renewals, you can drive down overall costs and maintain an annual or monthly payment solution.
Consumption models
Why Leasing? Drive business innovation while managing costs. The leasing and finance world is in constant evolution. As we’re seeing the modernization of technology and the shift within workspaces, the demand for leasing and financing has significantly increased over the past five years. Organizations are looking at ways to conserve cash and rely on non-traditional methods to keep the IT department moving — ensuring business continuity.
Watch the on-demand webinar: How to Finance Today’s IT Needs and Stay Cash Positive
Consider pay-as-you-go data consumption models to maximize cash flow during high peaks and ensure you’re not paying for unused storage during low activity periods.
Asset buyback Look at asset buyback programs and use that cash injection to offset lease payments for a few months to optimize cash flows.
The leasing cycle enables organizations to upgrade technology faster and drive down associated costs while maximizing the productivity of everyone involved.
Talk to a specialist to learn about IT procurement options.
CXO Corner: Creating a Conscious Culture W
e asked one of the world’s leading technology brands, Cisco, to share their view of the intersection of the workplace and technology. During a complex time of workfrom-home isolation and racial unrest, Francine Katsoudas emphasizes the importance of putting people first — both within and outside of company walls. What is the role of a chief people officer? Initially, I defined my role as driving business impact by connecting people, culture and the organization to our broader strategy as a company. After working to link the people and business strategy, we focused more and more on the experiences of our teams, specifically in the places where the experiences differed and needed to change. Today, we work hard to build an environment of safety and trust where all voices are heard, and all people matter. This
“
opens us up to play to our strengths, become part of amazing teams, work for great leaders and choose the career path that's best for each of us.
What’s the best part of your job? The best part of my job is seeing people step into their strengths, and as a result, having incredible impact and success. I also realized that we get as much as we give when we’re working in — and with — our communities. It’s rewarding that we can do great work and have a tremendous impact on the world.
Francine Katsoudas EVP and Chief People Officer at Cisco
Today, we work hard to build an environment of safety and trust where all voices are heard, and all people matter.
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”
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How do you see your role evolving from today? COVID-19 put a spotlight on wellness, safety and trust. In fact, many companies feel that employee engagement has improved over the past few months. I think employees feel this focus. Sadly, the recent events surrounding George Floyd’s murder have deepened our resolve to build fairness, equality and inclusion within every team and to address the impact we can have in the broader community. My sense is that we’ll continue to look at the role of a chief people officer as one that works across the company to create the environment, characteristics and experiences that build our culture and success. At Cisco, we refer to this as conscious culture.
What advice do you have for CEOs or CIOs during these unprecedented times? Our people want to see us, hear from us and connect with us. Be present, communicate more often, listen more deeply and create more dialogue. We noticed our connections deepened across Cisco at our weekly check-ins as we saw each other’s homes, met some pets, children and grandchildren, and embraced life as it happened during these conversations.
Why is culture a strategy? At Cisco, we realize our culture is truly one of the biggest differentiators we have, and that puts an incredible amount of responsibility and accountability on every single person who works here to be a steward of culture. We believe this so deeply that we asked our employees to help us create our company principles. We know that when every person feels like they can have a tremendous impact, they make our products, technology, culture and business better.
Have you done anything differently in response to COVID-19? The question is really what haven’t we done differently? There are so many examples but let me share one that really stands out. Before COVID-19 we hosted monthly company meetings. We spent a lot of time planning for them and they were quite structured. One day we realized that our people needed more — they needed to hear from us as 44
leaders and they needed a trusted medical source. So, we pulled together an informal meeting with our leaders and a medical expert. With 30 minutes notice, 15,000 employees showed up. We realized our people needed this, so we made it a weekly habit. Now we have our executive leadership team, medical and mental health experts, and guest speakers come together weekly for a company-wide check-in with an agenda that’s driven primarily by the questions on our employees’ minds.
How do you support your people through change? The key is transparency. When my team understands why we’re changing, I find they create innovative ways to make that change happen. I’m transparent about what we’re trying to achieve, how hard it will be and how much I trust my team to figure it out. I think sometimes our teams need to hear that we know that change isn’t going to be perfect. I believe for any change effort, building momentum and early wins can fuel the next phase of the project. Sometimes the way to help someone through changes is to simply listen — there’s something powerful that comes from every conversation that leads to a better path forward.
“
I’m transparent about what we’re trying to achieve, how hard it will be and how much I trust my team to figure it out.
”
Remote and work-from-home options may have permanency. What advice would you give to be an effective leader in a remote environment? Let me start by saying that we can’t expect to return to the same work environment that we left. As we begin to step foot into our offices, we must realize it will be different. And that means that our leaders must learn how to become exceptional at remote leadership. It requires different skills and more presence when we aren’t present with one another. Leaders have to understand how each member of their team is doing, what they need and what their strengths are so they stay engaged by doing work that energizes
them. Some of the basics of remote leadership are to check in more often, have time set aside to connect without talking about a project or deliverable, and empower your team to find creative ways to connect.
How are you creating ‘innovative experiences’ and sustaining Cisco’s strong team culture while everyone is remote? In terms of innovation, we invited some amazing thought leaders to our weekly check-ins and we found some creative ways our employees naturally started to connect with each other. We realized quite quickly that there's power in taking a step back and pausing, so we recently gave our employees a day off for themselves to acknowledge how hard everyone is working and how important a mental break is. This was an idea that came directly from our teams. A way we sustain our culture is by giving employees the space they need to create culture on their own teams that connects with our company principles.
Considering every decision you make in your role is crucial for employees now, how do you make them? How do you make strategic decisions amidst so much uncertainty? The first thing I do is to be really clear about the outcome we want to achieve and the principles that will inform our actions. Often, we want to move fast, but it’s important to slow down to involve our people in the process. We make better decisions that way. I always look at the data and insights as well as the stories so I can weigh the risks and tradeoffs before we make a decision. In the time of a global pandemic and social inequality conversations, I center on my value of putting our people first.
When the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S., Cisco was one of the first companies to adapt a massive in-person industry conference (Cisco Live) to a virtual one. Why did Cisco quickly make that call, and how did the company manage to pivot so swiftly?
After re-scheduling and transforming Cisco Live, Cisco postponed the event again — this time, due to the start of nationwide protests over justice. Why was it important for Cisco to address the protests and take a stand, and how did that impact business operations? The question for us wasn't, "Should we take a stand?" It was, "How can we have the biggest impact?" We've always worked to foster an environment of dignity, respect, fairness and equality for all. This is a belief not just for our company, but also for society. Our hope is that we can listen, understand and define actions that will make progress toward a brighter, more inclusive world. We know that change doesn’t happen overnight, but we're working toward an environment of dignity and respect for all. For us, this started long ago when we developed online courses such as Courageous Conversations: Equality and Justice and invited guest speakers such as Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative to our company meeting. We were already having these conversations within Cisco. We stepped further into the topic of safety and trust for all as the tragedy unfolded with George Floyd and we further challenged racism, bigotry and injustice to ensure we have a society and a company where everyone feels safe. One of the most amazing things about Cisco is that, together, we can recognize the role we can play to support the communities of Cisco and beyond. I believe our conscious culture enables us to do more. We recently redefined our company purpose — to power an inclusive future for all — because we know that the impact we can make on the world is bigger than our company.
When we let the health, safety and well-being of our people — employees, partners and customers alike — drive our decisions, it becomes easy to make a call to turn our biggest in-person event into a virtual event. We could pivot swiftly because we already had the infrastructure and technology in place for a secure and collaborative experience.
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Responding to Change Through
Rapid Digital Transformation 5B Strategies for successfully embracing innovation on the path to a new normal ack in January, IT leaders and executives from across a range of industries gathered in Scottsdale, Arizona for the Insight Innovation Summit. Each year, this event provides an opportunity for decision-makers from across the country to share ideas, challenges and strategies around digital transformation.
This year, I had the privilege of hosting a joint breakout session with Dave West of Scrum.org, leading a series of structured conversations around the factors and frameworks driving innovation in 2020. Topics ranged from funding new ideas to managing external disruption. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing we discussed that day came anywhere near predicting the level of change we’ve witnessed since then. Today, we face a source of disruption unlike any in recent memory — one that has left no aspect of business untouched.
48
49
Share of workers and businesses impacted by th COVID-19 outbreak on in the United States as of March 24, 2020, by effect 125%
Yes
100% 75%
No
71%
62%
29%
38%
50% 25% 0%
Sales have decreased
75%
84%
25%
16%
Conferences or Problems Staff shortage with supply due to illness other meetings chain, such have been as decreased cancelled or availability from postponed usual suppliers
62%
70%
38%
30%
I have been ask to work from home
Other
Additional Information: United States; March 18 to 24, 2020; 4,428 respondents; 18 years old and older; Online survey Sources: Thomson Reuters; Ipsos ©Statista 2020
Figure 1: Workers and businesses impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States as of March 24, 2020. 71% reported seeing a decrease in sales, 62% say conferences or meetings have been canceled or postponed, 75% report problems with supply chain, 84% experienced staff shortages due to illness, 62% have been asked to work from home and 70% reported other issues.
With declines in sales and production, shortages of staff and shifts to remote work, one thing is evident. Digital transformation is no longer just an opportunity for growth. It’s an imperative for business survival.
Lessons in innovation
50
1
Start with the problem, not the solution.
Especially when driven by a sense of urgency, it can be tempting to dive into transformation without taking the time to fully understand the challenge. You can — and should — find opportunities to start small. But even when dealing with something as simple as deploying a collaboration tool, this is a critical first step. Begin by analyzing and clearly defining the core problem you need to solve. Take the time to connect with employees and customers to understand where challenges or areas of opportunity exist. This is key to ensuring the alignment and ultimate value of your initiative.
3 Managing this level of rapid transformation in response to disruption can seem like a daunting task, particularly if you weren’t already taking steps to become more technology driven. The good news is, even a few small changes can make a significant difference. And, whether you’re simply migrating workloads to the cloud or shifting to a whole new business model, there are a few basic steps that your organization can take to begin reducing risk and quickly realizing Return on Investment (ROI).
Technologies critical to digital innovation initiatives
While the driving factors behind driving transformation may have shifted, the strategies and best practices for planning, implementing and managing it ultimately remain the same.
Don’t underestimate the human factor.
A successful transformation depends on people effectively adopting new ways of working or interacting with your organization. This means your transformation strategy will need to plan beyond just the technology to encompass the people and processes that will support it. Organizational Change Management (OCM) offers a wealth of valuable tools for ensuring efficient usage and maximizing ROI — from strategizing for communication and training to anticipating and overcoming resistance.
“Transformation is like heart surgery,” he explained. “You hope it’s rarely necessary. It’s better to go in prepared than having to cut costs. And once you’ve started the process, you have to finish it.”
Now as we begin to explore the path back to public life, organizations will need to continue to embrace new ways of operating and supporting both employees and customers. Services will need to be digitized and data leveraged to protect employees and customers in public spaces. Processes and infrastructure will have to be optimized to reduce costs.
In the coming months and years, the ability to quickly adapt to changing demands will be critical to business survival. Fortunately, there are ways to begin digitizing iteratively to achieve impactful outcomes.
2
Also speaking at this year’s summit was renowned organizational strategist and author, Geoffrey Moore. Among the many insights delivered in his keynote, one particular analogy stood out then and, for many, may resonate even more today.
The past few months have seen rapid and unexpected changes across businesses and public agencies alike. For those responding to drastic change, the metaphor of emergency surgery may not be far off. Operating models have shifted, new infrastructures and selfservice solutions have been deployed in support of remote work, often at speeds and scale previously thought unachievable.
Strategies for digital transformation
Invest in a future-proof infrastructure.
When it comes to laying the foundation for new technologies, now and in the future, there’s no question some level of investment will be required. But properly managed, the benefits of transformation far outweigh the cost of stagnation. And some of these technologies, such as the public cloud, can actually drive down costs in the long run. Start by building on what you already have in place. There’s no one correct IT architecture, and there are often ways to improve the resiliency, security or cost
62%
50%
44%
Cloud
Advanced analytics enabled by AI, big data and machine learning
Mobile devices and applications
34% Internet of things (IoT)
33% Collaboration technologies
Figure 2: According to decision-makers surveyed in the 2019 Insight Intelligent TechnologyTM Index, technologies ranked most critical to digital innovation initiatives include cloud (62%); data, AI and machine learning (50%); mobile devices and apps (44%), Internet of Things (34%) and collaboration technologies (33%). Since this report was published, the ranking of collaboration technologies is expected to have increased significantly.
efficiency of existing systems. Some may benefit from the variable cost models of the cloud and XaaS. Other organizations running on monolithic platforms may benefit from microservices. Ensure you have the developers or data scientists on staff to manage asks, or partner with other IT experts to help you identify and fill in any gaps in your IT team.
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Stay agile by iterating from good to great.
Digital innovation isn’t about starting with a perfect idea; it’s about taking a solid concept and making it great. Monumental tasks like those many organizations now face are best accomplished in manageable pieces through ongoing feedback and collaboration with end users. Approaches like Agile and DevOps provide a valuable framework for achieving your transformation goals while engraining a culture of continuous improvement.
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Stay in touch.
Transformation is a process of ongoing growth — not a one-time implementation. It’s important to recognize that continuous management and ongoing shifts will be required both to ensure continuous improvement and to respond to ongoing changes in the greater landscape. Stay in two-way communication not just with those managing the change, but also with those affected by it. Gather feedback, usage stats, and other metrics around support to measure success and address ongoing challenges.
TechTalk
Weekly insights to help your business meet shifting technology needs
Carving a path to a new normal In the coming weeks and months, we face a degree of ongoing uncertainty. But while there are sure to be obstacles on the road to our new normal, there will also be opportunities. Those who were undergoing or planning for transformation in the near future may be considering whether to accelerate, cancel or alter those plans in response to new areas of need. Remember — pivots are a necessary part of any transformation, but as Geoffrey Moore so memorably stated — the key is to keep moving forward. If your organization was already moving toward integrating new technologies, leverage that momentum. Re-examine your business challenges and adjust plans as needed to begin putting your business in a position to capitalize on eventual economic recovery.
Listen here
Take the steps to ensure a successful transformation. Our experts share what it takes to empower both the IT and the human side of change.
About the Author Matt Jackson
VP & National General Manager for Digital Innovation, Insight
If you weren’t already planning for transformation, start now. It may seem like a long road ahead, but every step toward digitization is a chance for your business to come out stronger and more relevant in the future. By addressing each challenge holistically and iterating to make good ideas great, your organization can begin to not only adapt to our new normal — but also help to define it in ways that improve the way we live and work for years to come.
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I Case Study:
Insight Turns to Its Connected Platform to Return Teammates Safely to Work
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nsight, like most companies in these turbulent times, has contended with the challenge of shifting most of its teammates to a work-from-
home environment. But as the worst of COVID-19 hopefully passes, the company is now focusing on how to thoughtfully bring its workforce back to office buildings and facilities.
In late May at its main distribution and integration center in Hanover Park, just outside of Chicago, Insight began installing a smart-space solution built on its Insight Connected Platform that’s designed to help detect for symptoms of the virus and prevent its spread in the workplace. The Internet of Things (IoT) solution — dubbed Connected Platform for Detection and Prevention — uses thermal cameras and other edge devices to create a more efficient, more discrete and less labor-intensive way to screen large groups of people via contactless temperature monitoring as they enter the workplace. The platform allows other intelligent preventive measures to be added, such as smart hand sanitizer stations and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled cameras and speakers to detect use of appropriate personal protective equipment, check physical distancing and broadcast audio reminders if people congregate too closely together. Insight is now deploying the Connected Platform for Detection and Prevention solution at 13 other North American locations — including its corporate headquarters in Tempe, Arizona — as it begins a phased approach to reopening offices and distribution centers of 50 or more teammates.
Insight began installing a smart-space solution built on its Insight Connected Platform that’s designed to help detect for symptoms of the virus and prevent its spread in the workplace.
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To this end, Insight, together with leading partners Citizen Care Pods Corporation, PCL Construction, LifeLabs, Microsoft, Intel, Dell Technologies, Bosch and others have developed a smart portable virus screening and testing center made from shipping containers. The Citizen Care Pod has the potential to reduce pressure on hospitals by quickly bringing testing and screening to places where people work and play. Each testing center is equipped with smart technologies that can be installed within a few hours in high-traffic areas, such as:
“Bringing our teammates back to work means doing so as safely and sensibly as possible, and helping people feel comfortable in the process.”
“Bringing our teammates back to work means doing so as safely and sensibly as possible, and helping people feel comfortable in the process. The technology is there to help with that, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach since our locations serve different purposes and see varying levels of traffic,” said Megan Amdahl, senior vice president of operations at Insight. “We may use a more complex, multiscan thermal camera setup to screen multiple people at the entrance of a large facility like Hanover Park, yet set up less expensive thermal cameras for smaller offices. Or use a combination of smart devices across a facility. Connected Platform is allowing us to adapt the technology to what each of our locations needs.” The Connected Platform provides a flexible, scalable foundation to unify data from a wide range of devices, cameras and sensors, directed through a user-friendly dashboard. “A company can rapidly deploy IoT solutions through the platform, creating a hub to ingest data, set up user security, manage multiple sites and sensors, get baseline reports and build alerts,” said Jeff Dodge, national solutions director of Insight Digital Innovation. "In this case, the Connected Platform is creating two main workstreams to help provide safer work and customer spaces: detection of symptoms and prevention of virus spread." At its Hanover Park campus, where more than 500 teammates work, Insight installed at the main entrance of each building a thermal camera connected to an edge server that can automatically screen up to 30 people from a safe distance to detect elevated body temperatures, since fever can be a sign of COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control 56
Cameras with AI developed by Insight to track in real time how many people are being served to ensure healthcare staffing and supplies meet the demand; and Prevention (CDC). On the prevention side, traditional optical cameras with edge vision modules and machine learning capabilities will manage CDC-recommended social distancing and face mask adherence throughout the facilities. The company also installed smart hand sanitizer units from partner GOJO that will alert facilities managers when levels are low and track hygiene patterns over time. The pre-built Connected Platform allows companies to prove an IoT use case in their environment within a matter of days, pilot in a few weeks and then rapidly roll out to production across many sites. Besides safer workplaces, the Detection and Prevention solution has limitless industry uses to curtail the spread of viruses in places where workers or patrons gather in groups, including restaurants, shopping centers, airports, entertainment venues, theme parks and cruise lines.
Machine learning-based machine vision to detect queues forming, crowd size and even social distancing and face mask adherence; Environmental controls to monitor for proper room temperature, pressure and humidity levels inside the Citizen Care Pod; Tablets to enable real-time, non-contact communication between healthcare workers and patients, including a health questionnaire conducted by an Insight-developed chatbot with instructions in multiple languages; Smart hand sanitizer dispensers from our partners GOJO, makers of Purell, that integrate Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors to help promote usage and compliance with hygiene policies, and notify when dispensers need replenishing
The Connected Platform provides a flexible, scalable foundation to unify data from a wide range of devices, cameras and sensors, directed through a userfriendly dashboard. “The current climate has caused all of us individually to give serious thought about how we work and play, but it’s also pushing us to find more intelligent and proficient ways to do business. COVID-19 might be pushing us to act now to regain a sense of normalcy, but the return on investment can be even more meaningful over time with the right solutions. Detection and prevention technologies, such as an access control camera panel deployed today with thermal screening, can translate to automated building access for employees or delivery people in much the same way we use facial identification to open our smartphones. Necessity today is driving opportunity for tomorrow,” said Dodge.
About the Author Scott Walters Public Relations Manager, Insight
“In this case, the Connected Platform is creating two main workstreams to provide safe work and customer spaces: detection of symptoms and prevention of virus spread.” 57
Cloud • Mobile • Threat Prevention
WELCOME TO THE
FUTURE CYBERSECURITY OF
Aut h o r : G ra nt A sp l und , Grow th Te chno lo g ies Evang elist, Che ck Po int
Early in the 20th century, my great grandparents came to the United States from Scandinavia (Grandpa was from Sweden; Grandma was from Norway). They settled in the Pacific Northwest in a place named Ohop Valley. As was common in those days, neighbors would barter and trade goods in place of currency. One of the simplest ways to do so was with chickens … one rooster and one hen and you’re in business. So that was precisely what my great-grandparents did. I have fond memories of going to my grandparents’ chicken farm as a youngster in the ‘60s and ‘70s. At their peak, my grandparents would hand gather more than 2,000 eggs a day.
Collecting the eggs by hand with wire baskets was just the beginning. Every egg needed to be hand cleaned, weighed and sorted by size. Additionally, each egg had to be checked for any cracks in the shell and internal bloodspots. This meant holding the egg up to a box with a hole in front and a lightbulb inside. The box shielded the egg checkers’ eyes from the bright light and directed the light out the front hole. By holding the egg up to the light exiting the hole, the checker could see into the egg and look for any damages. Seven days a week, my grandparents could be found in their basement, sitting in rocking chairs cleaning eggs with sandpaper blocks. Then they would inspect them, weigh them, sort them by size and put them into the industrial-grade, walk-in refrigerator. In essence, my grandparents were checking their assets for compliance violations — dirt, feces, cracks or bloodspots. They wouldn’t be able to sell their eggs if any of these violations were found. But even though they only had to perform their compliance checks once, my grandparents couldn’t scale. Sure, they could have hired additional help but there simply wasn’t enough profit in selling eggs to distributors without economies of scale. However, for you, when using the public cloud for your data center and workloads, the list of things you must do and confirm to ensure compliance with NIST, HIPPA, PCI and other regulations is far more
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comprehensive. It must be continuous; one check is not sufficient in the dynamic and constantly changing cloud. Moreover, the consequences of non-compliance can be far more devastating and costly. It’s simply impossible to do it all by hand and without the assistance of technology. Eventually, my grandparents went out of business because they couldn’t scale to compete with the automated poultry and egg industries. Today, automation and technology have replaced the manual processes they once completed by hand. Similarly, as you work to simplify and scale your business’s move to the public cloud, you need to automate configurations to ensure continuous compliance of your workloads. With the right tools you’ll be able to find and automatically fix the cracks in your cloud security posture. Cloud security posture management includes automated tools and vendor-provided frameworks that can make some of the challenges of cloud security easier by providing expert systems of automation and compliance in cloud environments. These cloud security solutions ensure security requirements are monitored in cloud technologies, including emerging serverless and containerized environments.
CHECK POINT’S CLOUDGUARDTM is a platform for users of cloud
services from AWS®, Google Cloud or Microsoft® Azure®. It provides a way to assess your security posture against compliance requirements, detect misconfigurations, then monitor and enforce your actual compliance.
Microsoft also makes it easy to securely migrate from End of Support Windows Server® platforms to Azure, through Check Point. Companies that utilize today’s automation and compliance tools via a cloud security blueprint and guidance from a partner like Insight can improve their cloud confidence — and protect against identity theft and data loss in the cloud.
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Hybrid IT Partnerships
Critical to Business Continuity
In a time when business continuity is being stress-tested like never before, some organizations are finding that a new kind of IT partnership is making all the difference.
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020 has brought major shifts to the workplace at a speed no one could have fathomed even just a few months ago. According to a recent Gallup report, 62% of U.S. workers are now engaging in remote work. That number has doubled since early March, when only 31% of employees reported working from home. Prior to 2020, many companies were already experimenting with remote work, but few were willing to fully embrace the trend due to either perceived technology limitations or the fear of decreased employee productivity. In fact, just two years ago, 44% of companies around the world didn’t allow remote work at all. Now, most companies have been forced to adopt remote work in a way they never expected — and on incredibly short notice.
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Lessons learned in the move to remote work When businesses were required to close physical offices and send employees home to work, it quickly became apparent which companies were prepared and which weren’t. Organizations everywhere faced a number of challenges, including a shortage of laptops, lack of a scalable virtual desktop environment, inaccessible company networks, questions around security and a shortage of end-user support resources. This set of challenges put even the most robust business continuity plans to the test. From what I’ve seen, the companies that fared best were those that were able to scale resources on demand via IT service partnerships. Having extra resources available allowed these organizations to move fast and adapt when the unexpected happened. Companies that relied solely on insourced IT lacked the resources and skills needed to scale quickly and address new IT concerns. The situation highlighted how valuable supplemental IT services can be when it comes to business continuity. It also initiated a turning point in how organizations are thinking about IT services. Now, I believe we’ll see business leaders shifting away from insourcing and traditional IT outsourcing in favor of something new — hybrid IT partnerships.
In a recent poll,
59
%
of U.S. workers say they would prefer to continue working remotely as much as possible even after business restrictions are lifted. 62
How hybrid IT partnerships differ from traditional IT outsourcing For years, IT outsourcing meant that a service provider would staff positions in your company to fill a need the business couldn’t meet itself. While this method didn’t necessarily save on costs, it helped companies address skill gaps in their workforce and reduce the burden of employee management. The dialogue around hybrid IT delivery came about because, with traditional outsourcing, there was an expectation that certain walls existed between the business and the service provider. Though they may have been working toward a common goal, they weren’t necessarily part of the same team. When you look at the state of IT today and the progress the industry is making toward digital transformation, competitive advantage really hinges on teamwork and scalability. Hybrid IT partnerships ensure greater unity and teamwork by blending the business and the service provider. The service provider becomes part of the organization’s IT team, delivering scalable, managed services from within the business. To be successful, I think modern businesses will need a cohesive IT strategy, combined with the ability to scale resources up or down when necessary. Hybrid IT partnerships can deliver this flexibility, as well as the expertise and guidance to help businesses run smarter. With greater engagement between the two IT organizations, hybrid partnerships move beyond the classic vendor/client relationship, allowing the service provider to become a true partner in the client’s success.
Spring for the right partner, not just the lowest bid. As companies start returning to business as usual, many will need the help of a hybrid IT partner to adopt new ways of working and provide the support employees need in this new environment. Given the current financial climate, many companies will be tempted to issue a Request For Proposal (RFP) and simply select the lowest bidder. However, this type of thinking doesn’t bode well for the future of the business.
While one vendor may offer the lowest price now, they may not be able to provide the innovation and support your company will need for the future. Also, the lower cost often comes at the expense of human interaction — low-cost service providers keep costs down by relying on bots and taking human connection out of the equation. Especially now, people want a strong customer experience. I think Insight excels in this space because of how we behave toward our clients and the personalized support we deliver. The human quotient is much stronger here and I think that tends to get lost in the dialogue around cost and technology. So, if I can just advise you today, don’t base your decision on cost alone. Instead, I urge you to look for a long-term partner who can assist with finding smart ways to reduce the cost of operations now, while positioning your business to thrive in the future. Because it’s a journey, right? It’s going to take time to get there as your company has to transform and use capital smarter and do business smarter.
Look for a long-term partner who can assist with finding smart ways to reduce the cost of operations now, while positioning your business to thrive in the future.
Now’s the perfect time to get back to basics. Not every business is as forward-thinking as we’d like to believe. Most of our clients still have very basic problems they’re trying to solve, often stemming from legacy technologies. Organizations still need help stepping into the future — right now, they just need to get the basics right. In today’s financial climate, no one is projecting an increase in IT budgets or working capital. That means digital innovation projects could be put on the backburner for a short time — however, no business can afford to delay innovation for long. Companies need a hybrid IT partner who can be tactical and scrappy enough to get them through the current situation, but also strategic enough to stair-step the business into the future later. What I’m telling clients is this: Let’s get the basics right now to increase efficiencies today and lay the foundation for tomorrow’s digital transformation. This is achievable right now and it represents low-hanging fruit for nearly every client I talk to. By just doing the basics right, we can be more efficient, eliminate steps, and move faster to positively impact cost structure and improve user experiences. Keeping a future-forward mindset can be challenging when the future seems like a moving target. Stay strategic with expert insights and predictions from Forrester’s “Future Of Work” report.
About the Author Daniel Schneider
Director of Connected Workforce, Insight With special contribution from David Downers and Lawrence Sellers 63
How Remote Patient Care Through
Telehealth Is Quickly Gaining Traction
Y
ou may have noticed an uptick in telemedicine offerings and requests over the last few months. We’ll explore the “why” behind this surge and outline IT best practices for organizations making the shift.
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How has telehealth become what it is today? The practice of telemedicine has been around since the late 1950s when doctors began using photos and videos to transmit data in an academic setting. Since its debut, we’ve seen telemedicine delivered to address a broad range of needs: to manage ongoing conditions like diabetes, to address everyday care issues like rashes or to determine the level of care required for urgent symptoms such as a sinus infection. While the concept itself isn’t new, the level of application required has dramatically surged in the past few months.
With a national outbreak declared in the United States, researchers discovered telehealth visits increased more than 50% for the month of March alone. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, cost, availability and uncertainty over the personability virtual appointments could provide slowed the adoption of telehealth. But in response to the highly contagious virus, the government and healthcare systems around the country had to quickly ramp up virtual health care to comply with stay-at-home orders, prevent the risk of overrunning healthcare facilities, and protect both patients and providers. Now, low-risk patients have the option to avoid exposure by seeking aid from the comfort of their homes. Hospitals with overwhelmed Intensive Care Units (ICUs) also benefit as teleconferencing enables knowledge sharing between ICU-specialists and other providers currently being assigned to areas they may not be familiar with in order to fill the needs gap.
Benefits of telemedicine: At-home convenience Faster diagnosis & treatment Greater reach to rural communities Remote monitoring options Knowledge-sharing capabilities Safety for high-risk patients Technological insights & data tracking
Which brings up the questions: How are healthcare organizations going to deliver the same level of care, especially during surges, in a remote but connected way? How can doctors and hospitals address the pain points of different communities given any short-term limitations of either resources or expertise? We have to adapt quickly. Afterall, we can expect telemedicine to stick around long after this outbreak and continue to be a valuable resource for collecting medical data remotely, safely and conveniently. But we cannot expect facilities to rip and replace their entire systems to meet these needs. Rather, we hope healthcare organizations can add intelligent technology on top of the existing setup to bring greater value to their offerings. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, edge devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) will all play a significant role not only in expanding healthcare, but also in helping care facilities evolve beyond decades-old infrastructure.
Rural areas are another segment that leverage telehealth services to provide care at a greater scale, alleviating the strain on doctors and nurses. More than 120 rural facilities have closed in the last 10 years, further limiting the care people receive in remote communities.3 Telehealth continues to be a way to connect patients to vital care services from counseling support, symptom diagnosis, monitoring and maintenance, and more. On top of all of this, we’re seeing challenges where there’s a growing disparity in the ratio of doctors to patients.
per 1,000 patients.
IoT-enabled, smart IT is a game-changer for telehealth. It provides real-time support, helps providers treat chronic diseases anytime, anywhere and enables hospitals to better predict influxes according to seasonality or situational occurrences. As the healthcare space continues to evolve, we can expect these solutions to evolve along with it. The goal always being to provide safer, more effective care. According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, organizations looking to uphold an effective telehealth service will require:
The World Health Organization reported that in the U.S. alone, there are only
about 2.6 doctors
stay for those who require in-person care. Of course, we’re still going to expect and encourage people to go into urgent care or their physician’s office when they feel unwell, but on an as-needed basis. For those seeking a consultation, are checking in on an existing maintenance plan or need to renew a prescription, their doctors and nurses can look and listen for key symptoms through a monitor and remotely provide directions for care.
• Sufficient bandwidth provided by an affordable, reliable broadband service to prevent dropped connections • Imaging technology or peripherals to enable at-home health treatments even if the patient is miles away • Secure infrastructure to store, manage and protect confidential patient data on premises or in the cloud •P roper training for staff to adapt care services in order to provide high-quality care through a different medium
Explore purpose-built connectivity solutions for healthcare. Learn more About the Authors This motion will also require organizations to revisit existing security protocols. As patients rely on virtual appointments to meet with providers, confidential information will need to be protected in transit and in the data center or cloud.
Kristopher Blasi
Director of Strategy, Insight
Brian Cea
Manager - Partner Engagement and Business Development Strategy, Insight
Smart systems can increase data consumption and protection, forecast care models and reduce length of 66
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Student-centered devices One thing that hasn’t changed is that the numberone priority in fostering digital learning is getting devices in the hands of students. With the right tools, students can easily access learning modules and complete their assignments while at home. Many leading brands offer laptop, 2-in-1 and tablet models that have been carefully optimized for education environments. Their mobility allows students to move seamlessly between home and the classroom, and their durable hardware is better equipped to resist wear and tear. For younger grades and students with limited access to technology, intuitive interfaces can accelerate the journey to digital learning.
Ways to Prepare for
Back to School 2020
T
hinking about the future of education raises more questions than answers, but strategic planning can ensure your school is ready for whatever comes next.
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Connectivity solutions While personal learning devices are an urgent need, internet access is equally important to ensure students can explore course materials, participate in audio and video lessons, and communicate one-on-one with instructors and peers.
The biggest digital learning requirement is still personal learning devices — but keeping those devices connected is just as urgent. If your students and faculty already have access to Wi-Fi at home, it’s important to invest in security tools that keep cyberthreats at bay. Schools are not immune to security breaches, and solutions such as access control measures, firewalls and robust authentication will help you minimize risk. For schools located in areas impacted by broadband disparities, the connectivity equation is more complicated. However, solving it makes a massive difference not only for students, but also for their families and your larger community. Districts across the U.S. have displayed incredible creativity in keeping their students connected this spring. They’ve equipped common public objects such as stop signs with access point technology, and have even transformed unused school buses into large, moveable hotspots for neighborhoods with limited internet service.
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Faculty and staff training In many ways, the questions schools will face over the next few months are matters of change management. Giving students and teachers productive, connected tools is a foundational need, but additional training can help them make the most of the hardware at their disposal — and can help you realize the full value of your IT investment. This is particularly true for your faculty and staff.
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Opportunities for differentiation As you move from addressing short-term challenges to preparing for what might come next, you will search for ways to not only deliver lessons effectively, but also to re-establish what makes your school community unique. This is particularly true for higher education institutions where the on-campus experience and extracurricular activities are a major draw for prospective students. Leveraging cuttingedge technologies such as augmented reality can offer an unexpected learning experience that keeps your institution ahead of the curve.
While students adapt to different ways of learning, don’t forget that instructors are also adapting to different ways of teaching. And, though many of these changes will be productive, they still bring growing pains, especially given the added pressure to adapt quickly. Guidance from educational technology experts smooths the transition and helps teachers develop strategies for meeting immediate requirements in a way that fosters long-term innovation. It’s impossible to fully replicate the traditional classroom in a digital or even a hybrid space. Instead, educators must figure out the best way to use the tools at their disposal to reach the learning objectives and community goals they have set out for their students. Technology training simplifies that process by minimizing the stress of adopting new hardware and applications so that your teams can focus on their primary passion and area of expertise: serving students. 72
What makes your student experience unique, and how can you use technology to continue to provide it? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for handling this turning point, but every school will have to expand its technology platform and reconceptualize the classroom experience in some capacity. You may not be able to return to business as usual this fall, but with the right equipment and training — and an innovative mindset — you can establish new ways of serving students and creating a school community.
Create a future-ready school. Insight Public Sector selects, deploys and manages technology tools that fuel student success. About the Author Brian Louderback Regional Sales Director, Insight Public Sector
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Financial Flexibility Afforded by Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP) AGREEMENT
It’s time for a scalable solution.
T
oday — more than ever — it’s critical to understand how to acquire technology in a manner that best protects the company’s budget. An important place to begin this conversation is with your Microsoft footprint.
Microsoft® technology is pervasive and represents a sizable investment for practically any organization. Understanding how to optimize this investment can be meaningful and, in many circumstances, provide tremendous financial gains.
Over the last several years Microsoft has made a deliberate transition from its traditional EA to CSP.
Enterprise Agreement: a multiyear structure, featuring large, upfront, annual payments
Cloud Service Provider (CSP) agreement: provides monthly subscription or consumption, based invoicing
There are many complex differences between the license agreements but the CSP agreement has a clear advantage when it comes to cash flow and the preservation of capital.
Gain control and set your company free from up-front-pay license agreements. 74
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Beyond providing subscription-based license management with technologies such as Microsoft 365™, the CSP agreement is also a powerful structure for cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure®.
In the case of Azure, traditional structures generally require upfront financial commitments often tied to discounting. But much has changed and today’s savvy Microsoft cloud users are turning to CSP or other modern consumption-based agreements to pay for actual usage, more effectively preserving capital.
A final advantage of the CSP agreement structure is that it allows Microsoft partners to bundle support services within the acquisition of the technology. At Insight, we take advantage of this capability by including various cost optimization services along with the acquisition of Azure itself.
When describing the financial flexibility of the CSP agreement, an easy example to use is professional sports: Imagine a baseball team. Throughout the team’s season, the organization has 1,000 employees who require Microsoft technology. Under the traditional Microsoft EA, the team would make an annual payment for each of these employees. If each employee’s license cost was a hypothetical $120 per seat/per year, the total investment made by the organization would be $120,000. It’s an easy calculation but the outcome is certainly not a good deal for the organization. In reality, a professional baseball team sheds half of its staff during the off-season. With the traditional EA, the organization would pay two times the market value for its technology (per seat) for half of the year. With the CSP agreement, that same organization can “throttle” (up or down) its subscription and pay monthly. This provides a structure where the company will only pay for seats actively using the Microsoft technology. In this case, if we take the annual cost per seat and reduce it to a monthly rate of $10 per seat/per month
$60,000 + $30,000
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Then they will be investing
In-Season
And investing
Off-Season Annual
Total Cost
Beyond the cashflow benefits of CSP, it’s also important to acknowledge the effective rate provided by the monthly program. In the case example, the effective annual rate is $90,000 – or the equivalent of a 25% discount to the $120 per/per year rate provided under the traditional EA. Anything short of this level discount (on an EA) isn’t only a poor cashflow decision but also a premium price.
Today, the financial flexibility of CSP is becoming clear to organizations of all sizes. Initially, the program was released within the small and midmarket business space; largely providing companies the ability to scale up technology investments without significant, upfront capital outlays. But with the recent pandemic everything has changed. In many industries, the impact to the enterprise segment has been significant and in some cases, such as travel and entertainment, layoffs of nearly 90% are not unheard of. The ability of a CSP agreement to immediately scale down the license footprint of an organization is a massive advantage.
Insight has the expertise to make this happen for your organization, ultimately positioning your IT budget for its greatest impact. INSIGHT CLOUD CARE GIVES OUR CLIENTS THE ABILITY TO: Acquire Azure at market competitive rates, under a consumption model. Access best-in-class cloud monitoring and management tools. everage 24/7 administrative support L and a team of cloud success managers.
These cloud cost optimization services (bundled within the acquisition of Azure) are critical in today’s economy. By leveraging the support services included within the Insight CSP offering, our clients pay on a usage model (as opposed to paying upfront) while they reclaim wasted consumption, garnering a better return for their IT budget. Largely speaking, moving to a CSP agreement can be a simple process. However, in some cases, it can be more complex depending on the current renewal date of a pre-existing agreement. Regardless, if you need help from an expert, Insight has the resources to make this happen for your organization, ultimately positioning your IT budget for its greatest impact.
Learn more about Microsoft CSP and other solutions offered by Insight Cloud + Data Center Transformation.
About the Author Elliot Baretz
Director of Services for Cloud + Data Center Transformation, Insight 77
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Bolide BN-2600ACTC Access Control Camera Thanks to its instant face recognition algorithm and automatic no contact temperature reader, this camera effectively prevents anyone not wearing a face mask or with abnormal temperatures from entering the workplace.
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Explore the solution Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G technology, Wi-Fi 6 and hyperautomation ... what were once compute buzzwords are now a reality that every organization must embrace to accelerate digital innovation. Take a peek at this year’s most exciting innovations to help you stay on the cutting edge of IT.
iPad Pro Barco ClickShare CX-50 Bring your own favorite meeting platform with the new ClickShare CX-50 — a wireless conference system that allows you to connect to meeting room peripherals with the click of a button, while sharing video and content with remote workers. Explore the solution
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Make work and learning fun with an iconic tablet. With 5.6 million pixels, iPad Pro® features the highest resolution Retina® display of any iOS® deVice. Watch with stunning visuals. Create with fast Wi-Fi and LTE capabilities. Perform in a shockingly thin form factor.
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Microsoft HoloLens 2 Delivering a breakthrough combination of hardware, mixed reality and artificial intelligence, HoloLens® 2 offers new ways to connect and create. Build immersive applications and pave the path to virtual collaboration with this self-contained holographic computer. Explore the solution
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Between working remotely and working securely, there’s Webex. The work you do matters—no matter where you do it. That’s why Webex® provides simple and reliable video communication tools that allow you and your team to connect and collaborate securely. That way, you can take care of business anywhere you are. If you can imagine it, we will build the bridge to get you there.
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