How CDW’s Networking Services Help You Fill the Expertise Void
Even if you’ve already rolled out your networking technology, it’s wise to allow specialized networking services experts to reassess it and make sure everything is deployed properly.
Businesses and organizations often find themselves in need of experts when it comes to assessing, deploying and managing their networking solutions and infrastructures.
The reason is simple. Having experts helping you along your entire journey to plan, implement and support a technology rollout often gives you the best chance of gaining the outcomes you desire and the kind of success you expect.
In fact, performing a technology implementation, migration or upgrade without the knowledge or expertise required runs the risk of doing it wrong, potentially wasting a lot of money and, at worst, complete failure. Research shows “66 percent of technology projects end in partial or total failure. Larger projects are successful less than 10 percent of the time and are more prone to encountering challenges or failing altogether. Even the smallest software projects fail one in 10 times.”
Accord to Puneet Duggal, Cisco Acceleration Lead for CDW Canada, failure is often a result of lacking the technical expertise required because few people are experts at everything. He adds that the best way to do something may not always be the most cost-effective way.
“Sometimes you need to bring in experts to say, ‘What's the best way to get this done?’” he says. “Services are often an afterthought when procuring technology,” Duggal adds, explaining that CDW Canada provides a full breadth of IT services to support network technology integration, implementation and securing cloud environments.
“We want to make sure that you're set up for success to use and change the technology afterwards, so we'll plan for your success by providing services along the way,” Duggal says. “We want customers to understand we can help with adoption of advanced features as well as pre-sales and post-implementation reviews. Many organizations often don’t know if they did it right, if they did it in the best way possible way or if they templated everything in a way that makes future changes easier.”
And, if an organization has already deployed a networking technology solution, Duggal says it’s wise to allow specialized experts to reassess it, make sure it's deployed properly and perhaps even perform a wide area network (WAN) assessment to determine if additional changes might be needed.
CDW services for networking
Communication networks are expanding and modernizing faster than ever before and becoming more complex. In addition, digital transformation forces many organizations to take a hard look at how they can innovate and stay ahead of competitors, while connecting the unconnected with the Internet of Things (IoT) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies to support future needs and growth.
CDW Canada offers a full breadth of networking services for Cisco solutions to help organizations plan, implement and support their communication infrastructures, Duggal explains. CDW Canada is a Cisco-Powered technology services provider and a “Gold” Cisco partner, which is a designation given to those who provide “a high level of customer credibility and demonstrate superior service and support capabilities.” CDW offers Cisco SmartNet Level 1 and Level 2 technical support, plus advisory and assessment services for network construction, management and securing cloud environments.
Under the banner of Customer Lifecycle Services, CDW Canada offers the following:
1. Advisory services
CDW provides workshops to help those starting new networking initiatives and the expertise needed to tackle challenges along the way. Advisory services for networking include:
- Proof of concepts for SD-WAN, SD-Access and (Cisco) Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
- IoT discovery workshops
- Strategic roadmaps
- Planning and design workshops
- Training
2. Assessment services
CDW offers recommendations through the use of specialized expertise, data and tools to help those who may understand what they need to do but may not be entirely clear on what they need. Assessment services include:
- WAN assessments
- Cloud-networking assessments
- Network assessments
- Site surveys
3. Implementation services
These services support organizations that may not know how to install IT by providing engineering expertise to implement technology and ensure it will work. Implementation services include:
- Migration services
- Configuration services
- SD-WAN implementation
- Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) network management and command centre
- Cisco SD-Access
- Wireless networking
4. Adoption services
CDW can help you understand how to fully utilize networking IT to gain better results and to realize its entire value. Adoption services include:
- SD-WAN
- Cisco SD-Access
- Cisco Identify Service Engine (ISE)
- Cisco ACI, data centre network manager (DCNM) and Nexus Cloud
5. Management services
CDW teams perform 24x7 support to ensure things are kept up and running smoothly. CDW management services include:
- Remote monitoring
- Pre-staging
- Configuration support
- Secure access service edge (SASE) and Meraki network infrastructure
Site reliability engineering
CDW Canada also delivers site reliability engineering services to measure and automate network reliability and help organizations align with service-level objectives, agreements and the goals of IT organizations and businesses. Work is performed by a site-reliability engineer who focuses on automation, integration of different systems, aligning error budgets and service-level objectives by:
- Codifying network software artifacts and configuration into source-code repositories
- Automating the integration of testing and reproducible, versioned deployments
- Engineering in-production reliability, scale, efficiency optimizations, dynamic provisioning of networking resources for users and systems integration
- Testing to ensure deliverables are reliable enough to meet service-level objectives and agreements
- Monitoring service-level indicators, both manually and automatically, with analytics that trigger automatic responses and alerts for anomalous and statistically meaningful events