It is beyond debate that IT modernization efforts require a well-defined cloud computing strategy. In a recent survey, more than 95 percent of IT leaders said they are aggressively pursuing plans to leverage public, private and hybrid clouds to help meet the future IT needs of their organizations.

As we discussed in our last post, cooperative procurement contacts help government agencies, educational institutions and some nonprofit organizations save time and money on technology acquisitions by aggregating purchasing power. Analysts say state and local governments save more than $300 billion of taxpayer dollars each year through increased purchasing efficiencies.

As organizations of all sizes continue to move more data and workloads to the cloud, most are facing significant new security challenges. Ninety-eight percent of companies surveyed recently by IDC said they experienced at least one cloud data breach within the previous 18 months, with 67 percent reporting three or more such incidents.

The ability to deliver advanced communication and collaboration services to increasingly distributed workforces is driving rapid growth of cloud-delivered unified communications solutions. Analysts with Metrigy predict that 70 percent of businesses will be using UC-as-a-Service within two years.

Lacking a coherent collaboration strategy, many organizations adopt multiple collaboration solutions from multiple vendors, and don’t have much of a grasp on how much it all costs. The subscription and license fees are only the tip of the iceberg. Network and IT support costs and a poor user experience add to the TCO of collaboration.

Few organizations with contact centers were adequately prepared to make the abrupt transition to a fully remote operation with at-home agents in response to COVID-19. According to a Gartner study conducted just a few months before the pandemic upheaval, nearly 90 percent of global organizations relied on-premises contact centers — either at their own site or outsourced to another company.

Is your company hanging onto a legacy phone system in order to avoid the costs of an upgrade or a replacement? If so, you may not realize just how much that old phone system is really costing you.

If your phone system is more than 10 years old, your maintenance and infrastructure costs are likely increasing every year.

Virtual desktop technology has been around for more than a decade, but adoption has lagged due to perceived cost and complexity challenges. With more organizations looking to use the technology to support remote and hybrid workforces, Microsoft is simplifying desktop virtualization with its new cloud-based Windows 365 service.

As organizations continue to shift more and more workloads to the cloud, they may inadvertently create security vulnerabilities. Recent research finds that configuration errors, insecure interfaces, unpatched applications, and poor encryption and authentication practices are opening the door for a variety of exploits.

It’s hard to imagine how businesses could have overcome pandemic-driven operational challenges without the cloud. By some estimates, organizations accelerated their cloud adoption plans by an average of six years in order to ensure remote workers had access to the applications, data and services they needed.