CDW Managed Cloud Services Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The portal: The ability to get in and log a ticket is very helpful, but that is kind of a standard thing these days. 

The infamous whiteboard still has some things to deploy from my standpoint and our primary business solution standpoint. So, there is always room to grow. There are a few security things that I would like to deploy, such as single sign-on so the email address and password are the login. 

From my professional standpoint, I would like an app to manage WorkSpaces from my phone. I don't believe there is one right now, and I have looked. For example, if somebody comes to me, and heaven forbid I'm not in the office, my solution is to log into my phone to the portal via web, then scroll down and restart their WorkSpaces. This is assuming that I have the data, because in places like rural Pennsylvania, you can't guarantee that. They have an app for managing the servers, but WorkSpaces is where most of my day-to-day stuff ends up. This is not really under CDW, but if CDW developed an app for that, I definitely would partake in it.

If you take a dive through their websites, it feels like they were all put together by different teams. I know they are changing this because I am pretty sure that we have talked about this issue with the account reps. In the two years that we have used them, the websites have improved considerably. One used to be like an old SharePoint site that was Internet-facing, and I was very scared of it. They have actually gone to custom dashboards now, but I would love to see a single dashboard for my AWS, Office 365, and all of that stuff just laid out about three-tiers deep so I don't have to dig through websites.

I have been using this service for two years.

Our downtime per year, during a normal 8:00 to 17:00, is probably less than three hours.

It has saved us time in terms of not having downtime. It has saved us money because the accounting side is pushed heavily through WorkSpaces. Everybody uses it, but WorkSpace and accounting go hand in hand because we run all our billing through it. When accounting can run stuff consistently, that is a win for everyone because they are not as backlogged. Obviously, accounting is money going out and money coming in.

Brian is my account manager. I can ping him. There are a number of techs that operate under Brian. So, I can ping them for stuff and don't really need to log a ticket. They are into WorkSpaces far more than me, so I can say, "Hey, I'm seeing this behavior. Should I log a ticket?" Often, they reply back with, "No, run this command," or, "It's this service breaking." 

This is a resource sort of thing, where unless I scrolled deeply into WorkSpaces and neglected everything else, then I can't do it. While I would love to know everything about everything, it is just not possible. WorkSpaces is a critical component, but we also have the wireless, printers, physical workstations, our network infrastructure, social media, websites, and email. The way that IT works, it just goes around in circles. It is kind of mixed together. So, you can't possibly run everything inside unless you have a large company with a large staff.

50/50 - they know if something is wrong before we do. We have enough alerting in place that if something triggers, a ticket will be auto-generated, then there will be an engineer on it. This can be at all hours of the night, which is a very nice component. So, in the middle of the night, if a server crashes, there is a keep alive alert that states, "Hey, this thing is offline." Oftentimes, they will login and restart it before I even notice, then I will follow through the emails. For most of the showstopping items, those alerts and tickets are created automatically, usually before I notice, unless I am in the middle of something in the cloud.

There are also probably less mission-critical items that they might not necessarily see because there is no practical way to have that much alerting. However, we can meet in the middle, where I will create a ticket saying that this is down. While it is not exactly super important, I am wondering what the best solution for it is. 

I'll get an initial email, which will say, "A ticket has been auto-created." Then, within a minute or two, an engineer will be jumping in, saying, "Looking at this now." I can then just follow along and see that engineer XYZ is rebooting the server, and if the server came up okay and tested fine. I will usually test it on my end like, "Oh, yeah, we are up." I will reply back to the ticket, then they will close it. After that, we usually have a review, and that's where Brian, the account exec, comes in. Once a month, we will go through the tickets, and say, "This is a recurring issue. Why is that?" 

There was actually one awhile back where they had a weird error message that we had to look up. That was because Amazon was decommissioning the hardware that the virtual server that it was on. So, we had to look up the proper fix to that. It was actually to shut down the server, then boot it back up, and it will then appear on the new hardware. Stuff like that is cool because I can look at an error code, and say, "Oh, X, Y, and Z," then Google it to get an answer. Whereas, Brian can actually pull up the Amazon tech article, and say, "Oh, this is what Amazon will throw out to you when they are decommissioning old hardware," which is very helpful in terms of clarification.

The service provider has performed amazingly from a project management standpoint. Having Brian as an account executive who can run and be the voice on the CDW side, poking and being like, "Why is this ticket not done? Why is this ticket not done? What do we do about this?" His expertise in terms of what other companies are doing is priceless to where I don't necessarily have to read a white paper on the latest trends. He's like a one stop shop for that knowledge, to say, "Oh, I have a construction company in Oklahoma, and they are doing something similar. Here is what they're doing." I can then investigate that technology to see if it is a fit for us.

Every month, Brian sends me, "This increased because you put so much more information on this and you're not using these shares or IPv4 addresses. We can drop these." It is a good breakdown, because if I get a question, "Hey, our bill has been the same for six months. Why did it go up $400 (or $40 or 14 cents)?" Then, I can say, "Oh, that's because we paid for this and dropped this."

Positive

There was a previous solution that Bolger Brothers used, which was a third-party cloud solution. The downtime on that was considerable. That was reflected with schedules falling behind and goals missed. With Amazon, we probably maintain like a 99.9 uptime right now. For a company of our size, with the budget and the amount of resources we push into WorkSpaces, this is pretty good.

We were previously using UDNI, which is a local shop in Altoona. We switched vendors due to bad experiences. I came to the organization in 2019. The catalyst for the switch was that, a few years prior, UDNI got hit by the WannaCry bug, which was the encrypted scheme. Bolger Brothers ended up losing about six months worth of work, which had a substantial financial impact. 

Bolger Brothers decided that they needed an advocate for themselves when it came to IT. Essentially, they had no one internal and were unsure of what they were signing. Most of the time, it was, "Here is something that is new and shiny," and they would sign for it. Then my position came about, and we redid everything from the ground up: the infrastructure, wireless, cameras, social media presence, the website, etc.

I've used CDW since at least 2005. I have leaned on them pretty heavily over the years for technical expertise and physical equipment. They are a one stop shop for nearly everything IT-related.

At my previous job, I ran help desks for a large organization in the US, but it also had some international presence. I got equipment, services, pricing, and technology solutions for, "I have a problem, what are the industry standards right now?" All of that I leaned on CDW far more heavily than anywhere else. When I made the switch to Bolger Brothers, CDW came along for the ride. That is where I was able to say, "Okay, I have a problem. What's the solution?" 

It has grown into that relationship where they always help me out and I always help them out by name dropping to other people. I know I can go to them and get an answer or multiple answers for any problem that I am having.

CDW wasn't involved in the design. That was a previous vendor, and that is where I inherited it. CDW was more than willing to pick up and adopt the solution, where they said, "Okay, we didn't build this, but we will take ownership of it." We labeled out the support assumptions, which is where they went through and made recommendations for, "Here is how you're built and here's how you should be." That was a pretty lengthy process, where we had multiple engineers going through, being like, "Here's your security. Here is your virtual server setup currently. Here's what it should be. Here's your network. Here are your workspaces." There were some items on that list that were easy and some that are still not completed just because of the last year and a half, timing, and other things. For the parts that they were involved with, they have been very helpful.

From the time that we entered into an agreement to use the CDW Managed Cloud Services solution, it took us a couple months before we were able to start using it. We had some design meetings, then the actual transfer of the Amazon component to me.

Because WorkSpaces was still relatively new at that time, not many people had transferred vendors. We had to get additional resources from Amazon on a call to make sure we did it right and didn't end up in purgatory, essentially where nobody has ownership of our workspace. That was a few months of paperwork moving back and forth. Once we had the call set up, it worked pretty quickly.

An initial setup was required because our situation was unusual, not necessarily unique, but we were transferring vendors from a pre-existing environment. I remember going over it with the CDW Managed Cloud Services team for AWS, and it was, "We usually spin up environments or a company will create them internally, then we assume control." So, they really weren't used to going from vendor to company to themselves through another vendor, but we wanted to make sure that we did everything correctly. There were additional calls for the process and confirmation, even Amazon was a little bit like, "Oh, well, I'm not really sure how to do this without breaking everything. Let's check."

While the initial ramp up through CDW cost a little bit of money, we did a ground up review of what's in place, what's bad, and what we should change. This was a very flexible process that I don't think a lot of people would have done. They just would have been like, "Okay, we're going to manage it for you, but we're not actually going to tell you everything about it," versus CDW who put a couple of engineers on this. We actually went from the ground up, "Here is what you have. Here is what we recommend. We have no idea what this does, so let's delete it. This is costing you money and you're not using it." That sort of flexibility and openness is priceless.

Probably about a dozen were involved in the setup. There were two from our side: myself and the president. We also had some people from the previous vendor, a bunch of CDW, and a couple of Amazon employees.

If we have a design or bug meeting, others can jump in on it. So, if there's a behavior that someone is seeing, he/she can jump on the call and explain it to the engineer. Then, I can watch it as well, and say, "Here is what we are seeing," and the engineer can be like, "Oh, okay. That makes sense." If we're doing a design, such as a new service or new server being spun up, that CDW will have to manage, those parties can jump on the call as well.

For the vast majority of stuff, it is just me doing it alone.

It is a sanity savings. I could probably keep things running without them, but it would just be status quo. There would be no forward momentum. We have a call every month with my account manager, Brian, and it's always, "Here's where we're at, and here's where we're going." Then, he will always mention, "This is what CDW is adding. This is what Amazon's adding. This is what we are seeing from an industry standard, trend-wise. People are doing this and that. I have customers doing X, Y, and Z, grabbing this plugin." It is always helpful to hear what other companies are trailblazing, because then I can say, "Ooh, I like that feature," or, "That sounds like a good idea."

We are actually looking at something now for geo-redundancy, which is something I never considered. All of our stuff is located in a single data center in Reston, Virginia. We have a tentative plan at some point to create copies in another data center. So, if where we are at now ever goes down, which is highly unlikely but stuff happens, then we will at least have the redundancy to pop back up on the West Coast in about 10 to 15 minutes.

I can work on side projects without having to do daily maintenance and the usual break-fix stuff, which relates to the bug hunting previously mentioned. The ability for me to work on my own stuff, which is usually driven by my employees, is beyond helpful. It frees up my time to work on other things.

I can push through some of my infamous whiteboard items without having to worry about the day-to-day operations because it's all monitored and taken care of. For example, CDW pushes our patches on the second Tuesday of every month. They do a restart of all our workspaces. This stuff could be accomplished with a scheduled task. However, even with a scheduled task, I would have to sit there, watch, and make sure everything came back up. Instead, they do that for me.

It is hard to put a value on it. I leveraged it as this company by saying, "It's actually less than we were paying with our previous vendor, but here is what you're getting out of it." It has shown true since then.

You can't really put a price on the overall cost of the solution with the entire package. The first year that I was here, I did a budget breakdown: here is what I spent and here is what we saved. When I presented it at the end of the year, they were like, "Okay, that's beautiful," because no one had ever seen that before. It was like, "Okay, I swapped out the phone system. Here was what it was costing us. Here was what we paid. Here is what we'll save." It was, "Oh, we are going to pay for everything within three years." A lot of mysteries have been answered by the monthly budget breakdown.

A lot of people see the cost, and they are like, "Well, that is a lot if we already have an internal IT person." It's like, "Well, you're not just getting that." You are getting access to resources and peace of mind, to say, "I don't have to worry about this server dying at 2:00 in the morning because these guys will handle it." I will wake up, and if there would have been a problem, it would have been addressed. It would have been notated and fixed.

CDW Managed Cloud Services provide managed services to support our infrastructure solution in regards to the cloud. When I think of infrastructure, there is infrastructure in the cloud because we have our virtual network in there, e.g., all the networking between the servers and workspaces. These are all routes in which I have leaned on them to get clarification for, such as, "If I change this, will it break everything?" They answer, "No." Then, I ask, "What are the best practices?" and they go through them. There is also the local infrastructure, which is my physical setup in the main office and our satellite locations. While CDW does provide the hardware and some of the assistance for that, this is not under the managed services.

We are planning on increasing usage in terms of the WorkSpaces. By just the nature of business, more stuff will be added going forward. There should be an increasing number of servers and WorkSpaces as well as more traffic. This is just the nature of, "Oh, that is new and shiny. That has to go up there." It's always something. In the next three years, we will probably be doubling our footprint.

If you've never experienced it, this service is definitely worth a look at. From a traditional IT guy perspective, it takes a lot off your plate. It allows you to focus on other stuff without putting out daily fires. It makes you aware of security protections, infrastructure improvements, and all sorts of stuff that you probably would never figure out on your own.

I would definitely rate it as nine out of 10. CDW is always growing and adding stuff.

Employees, if they want to buy something, don't have to make a CDW account anymore. They can actually use their Microsoft email and that can go to me for approval. I can make sure they are not charging the company, then I can approve it. Before, it was like this weird sort of informal thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CDW's service enables us to deploy infrastructure services at our own pace without being limited by the availability of resources. It helps us leverage skills that take a long time to acquire, skills that we don't have in-house. Making use of CDW's skills in those areas saves us a lot of time.

We have been using CDW Managed Cloud Services for about three years.

We have plans to increase our use of the service. Our administration wants to remove all of our labs. That includes the photo lab, the physics lab, the architecture and design labs, as well as the photo and video labs. They want to do everything through AppStream and just have big-screen monitors mounted on the desks with a docking station where the students can plug their Chromebooks in, as well as an external mouse and keyboard. This way, we are utilizing one purchase for all the students, instead of having to buy kids a one-to-one Chromebook, plus replenish the labs every time they get outdated, times seven labs. If we can just use the Chromebooks and scale this out through AppStream, we will save a lot of money.

CDW's customer support is great. They're fantastic and the team is excellent. We have no complaints. Brian Leppert from CDW helps us maintain the costs on our fleets so that we don't overpay, and we keep customizing and adjusting it to get the most for our money. And he will help me to get technicians, on the spot.

For example, one of my staff members made a mistake and blew out some of the SAML connections for all of our students because he updated the certificate, not realizing that that certificate was updating the certificate for all of AppStream as well. We had to fix our AppStream to use the new certificate. It was after hours and we knew teachers were going to need their AppStream to be functional the next morning. We put in a ticket and we emailed our rep, Brian Leppert, and he got an AppStream engineer working on it that night and he fixed it for us. In the morning, our fleets were ready to go for our teachers. We couldn't ask for better tech support than that.

We do use CloudHealth which shows us our cost for using AppStream and that provides good insight, but a lot of it is Brian. He makes sure that we're using our fleet of computers efficiently. For example, if something hasn't been used in two months, we can drop it down until they start using it again. He's always on top of that. He's my go-to person to make sure we're using it as thinly as possible without compromising its effectiveness.

One drawback is that the ticket system is a little clunky for Managed Cloud Services. There is no ticket category for Managed Cloud Services, per se. It's a little awkward when trying to find a way to put a ticket in. It's just not streamlined enough and doesn't take you step-by-step. And it doesn't seem to have all the categories I need. If I'm putting in a ticket for AWS or AppStream, there is no category for them.

Once I get a ticket in, I have no complaints about the response to the ticket or the team that supports tickets.

In the past, we've used other outfitters such as a consulting company that does IT. They were okay but they were niche consultants. I'm not sure they were professionals in any field. They were just jacks of all trades. It's a bit of a roll of the dice when you hire local consultants. I was a consultant before I came to the school district, so I know how consulting companies work. But with CDW, their guys are AppStream people, and that's what we're using their managed services for. Using CDW means we're not getting people who are not involved in AppStream. They know AppStream.

We switched to CDW because our account rep there, Robert Leonzo, who sells us our physical equipment, managed to get us connected with the right CDW partners and set it all up. It's easy to work with Robert. When we need services, he takes care of everything. He got everything going for us. We had no idea that CDW did things like AppStream. We were talking to Robert and told him we were looking into Amazon WorkSpaces, and he said they had something new called AppStream. He got a demo of it for us and that's how we ended up going into CDW's managed services.

Once we had an agreement with CDW to use their services, it took about a week until the AppStream functionality was ready.

For the offsite backup, the things we had to do on our end were straightforward. For the AppStream, it was a lot of work on my end to get students added to the groups. We have about 12 staff members using AppStream, as well as about 600 kids who are using it.

For the on-site projector installs and the Juno installs, there were two of our staff involved, the techs at both schools. They assisted CDW and answered their questions when they ran into trouble.

The cost is very competitive and appropriate for what we get.

Another school was looking into similar things, like getting their labs onto Chromebooks. I told them to contact their CDW rep and talk to him about AppStream and that they'll set up the whole thing. You won't have to worry about anything. They'll give you a document to guide you on how to use it and help get it going.

For us, AppStream seems to be working out pretty well. At first, it was hard for the teachers to take on because it was a whole new approach. We had to hold their hands and walk them through how to do it so that they could teach their classes. Now that we're in our second year, a lot more of them have adopted it, and they're using it and when it doesn't work, I hear about it.

Our expectations of CDW have definitely been met in terms of the services delivered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their subject-matter expertise of the Azure environment is the best aspect of working with them. When they don't know something or have a direct line, they engage with Microsoft and get the answers, as needed. 

Their managed services team knows something is wrong before we do and fixes it for us. We are not waiting for our end users to tell us when something is wrong. We are able to go from a reactive state to a bit more of a proactive state. Rather than something is not working, and then our end users go, "Hey, this is not working. What's going on there?" We are typically being alerted right away, e.g., when the CPU hits a certain threshold or there is no available disk space. We get that alert and are able to act ahead of time to hopefully remediate the issue, or have CDW the remediate issue, before the end user notices something. This is important for the perception and availability of our IT services.

When you initially engage with them, there is the idea that you will have certain check-ins on a quarterly or monthly basis. That didn't really occur until we started to reach out to engage with them. As soon as we started to touch base, it was great. We identified that there were some other initiatives we wanted to get in place. However, it was really on us to get the ball rolling on that. It would have been helpful if we had a CDW resource reaching out, saying, "Hey, what do you want to do next? How is this working for you? How is this not?" That initial engagement would have certainly helped on the professional services side.

Sometimes, there is a lack of engagement that could be improved. While I am satisfied overall, there is room for CDW to reach out and be proactive with their customers, ensuring that they are leveraging all the tools available to better manage their environments.

We have been using CDW Managed Cloud Services for 22 months.

Our application administrator and I work with CDW to request work to be performed or update something, usually on a task basis.

A very small percentage of our infrastructure is leveraging CDW Managed Services within Azure. At this time, there are probably no plans to expand.

The customer support provided by CDW is good. We keep in regular contact with our managed services technical account manager. Overall, they are getting things done and doing them well. Sometimes, there can be a delay in response, then we need to reach out, to say, "Hey, where is this at?" or, "What's going on there?" So, they provide good support with good expertise, but there is probably some room for improvement.

We don't engage with their technical support a lot. We typically engage with our technical account manager. Overall, I have nothing bad to say about their technical support.

Positive

We previously have had other cloud-hosting vendors previously. We also do quite a bit of on-premise infrastructure. Knowing that we wanted to embrace cloud computing, we did not have the in-house expertise to deploy and manage that infrastructure in Azure. However, we wanted to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud infrastructure and IaaS environment. This is where we wanted to go, but we didn't have the internal expertise. We wanted to lean on and engage a partner to help us. This is why we look to CDW, because they are our Azure subject-matter experts.

We had TDS OneNeck previously. We switched because their back-end infrastructure was not as dynamic or scalable. Based on that. it prevented some of the flexibility that we were looking for.

It took a month or so from the time that we entered into an agreement to use CDW Managed Cloud Service until we were able to start using it, but that was more on our part. The infrastructure was available. We just had challenges getting the application up and running in time.

There was a delay because they were supposed to be monitoring the OS, but kind of forgot about it. After we had the implementation going, I had to reach out a bit later to kick things and get them going.

CDW listened to and understood our goals before designing and deploying a solution. I was certainly satisfied. We lacked quite a bit of knowledge with Azure, so they brought to bear networking resources, security resources, and overall service architecture resources when we were designing the environment. Not one resource has all the breadth that you need, but they were able to provide the breadth needed with a team approach. Each one of those team members had a considerable amount of depth in their knowledge within the Azure environment.

Sometimes, there were lags in projects, e.g., you are waiting for something to occur, so there might be a two-week lag. I felt sometimes that you needed to play catch-up with them again. We remembered the status of things. We knew where things were at. However, since it had been two weeks since they touched the project, because we were waiting on something to occur, it felt like we had to play a bit of a catch-up sometimes. They weren't maybe aware of all the different things going on. That was a bit challenging at times. There were also the times where maybe we didn't always receive the most prompt response on certain items.

During implementation, I wasn't that impressed with their performance from a project management standpoint, especially for the prices charged. I would have wanted to see more than that in terms of engagement. 

We had four staff who were involved with the setup in our organization: Two people for application administration and overall architecture; a network engineer and an overall director of technology.

We have seen ROI by using CDW Managed Cloud Services. We don't really have a cloud computing infrastructure team. To start working in Azure, we would have needed that and a number of different resources with various disciplines, which would have been a considerable amount of money.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has helped save our organization time because we don't have to work on the items that CDW does.

It has freed up staff time by not having them work on managing the infrastructure. We are able to spend time doing application administration, focusing on the long-term strategy of where we are going. The impact is that we are able to better leverage our investment in our application technology and offload infrastructure to CDW as part of their managed services.

On the implementation side, i.e., when they are designing and architecting things, we were charged a fair amount for a project manager role that I didn't think provided a lot of value, but certainly charged out a lot of money. I think there was a miscommunication in terms of expectations for that role, what that role would be providing, and the value of that role. On the front-end, it would have been better to help clarify things there.

CDW Managed Cloud Services will not be cheaper than what you are doing on-premises. It will be more expensive.

There are things where you can lock resources in on the Azure side for a few years, but you realistically don't want to do that for a while until you have a good understanding of the infrastructure being used. 

CDW Managed Cloud Services charges 18% of your overall monthly Azure spend. However, when they are doing a managed services engagement, you really don't get to see the direct costs from the Azure portal. You have to go into the CDW portal. 

Know what your end goals are. Make sure to have discussions with the architect/project manager to get a good estimate on what your monthly operating costs will be and what services are included for that cost.

In the next six to eight months, we are going towards the SaaS version of the software that they are helping us manage today. Then, we would no longer need CDW Managed Services.

An overall, complete SaaS application is a lot easier from an administrative perspective on both the application and infrastructure. With a SaaS environment, we would no longer have to worry about application administration as well as hardware administration. It would all be baked into the SaaS provider. However, we would no longer have full control of our environments, service uptime availability, security, etc. It is probably a bit more expensive too.

I would rate CDW Managed Cloud Services as eight out of 10. They are knowledgeable. I think they respond, but they could probably just engage a little bit more.

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

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

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

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

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

CDW Managed Cloud Services provides managed services to support our infrastructure solution. This is very important to us, not only serving as a piece of the backup, but because they also offer solutions. There are times when they will give us advice based on some feedback from the cloud and some of the reports that they run. This helps us to keep everything nice and secure. There is always a threat out there. They just let us know about any potential threats that may be out there.

It would be helpful if we had a tool inside the cloud where we could go and just see if we wanted to look at reserving additional resources, then what the cost would be. Just going in and having somewhere to say, "I want to add another VM with two disks like this," then they just could give me an estimate. This would help us know how to scale or structure the cloud resources that we need from them and how much it would cost.

I have been using it for two years.

We are still waiting on one thing, but it is not really CDW. It is just something from Microsoft. CDW is waiting for a patch for Microsoft, so I can't fault them for that.

We are still quite small at the moment. As we continue to grow, the service can grow exponentially depending on the number of users. However, right now, we are still a small team, under a hundred folks. So, we really don't need an entire staff dedicated to this, though it helps knowing when you have a reputable company watching the services. We still monitor, but it is good to have someone monitor the monitors.

There are just two of us managing these services right now: my manager and me.

As we grow, our needs will probably grow.

From the sales team, we work with Dan and Brian. Daniel is the executive account manager. He has been awesome. I only have high praise for Brian, our technical account manager. who has been great. He is always there to help.

A lot of times, we will file something through the help desk. If we need additional information, they are right there to assist us in whatever we may need.

We started off with CDW. We had a relationship with them from before, purchasing software, and it just grew from there. 

From the time we entered into an agreement to use Managed Cloud Services until we started using it was about a week. We were waiting for some things to finalize.

They just provided us the information to log onto the web and generated logins for us. That was it. It was pretty straightforward.

CDW listened to and understood our goals before designing and deploying a solution. They helped us tremendously. We are a startup company and didn't have a lot of experience with the cloud. So, we relied heavily on their expertise when we first designed this. We had some ideas of what we wanted, but there were some security enhancements that they suggested that really benefited what we needed to do. They have completely met our expectations on this. 

There are cost savings. It saves us from needing to hire someone full-time for monitoring. So, we don't need to have a full-time employee dedicated to managing these resources.

Using CDW Managed Cloud Services has freed up staff in our organization to work on other responsibilities. We don't need to have dedicated resources monitoring a lot of things. We can just go and look at a few logs or reports here or there, maybe once or twice a week. Whereas, if we didn't have these services, we would probably dedicate more hours. This saves us about 10 hours a week. For someone to really go through exhaustively and look at all that stuff, it takes about an hour and a half to two hours a day.

We are so small. For us, it has met our needs. As we grow, we may look to see how the cost differentiates as we grow. However, right now, it meets our needs and has been perfect for what we needed. 

The pricing is competitive, but we don't know how it will be later on along the line.

CDW’s free Recommendation Engine helps with rightsizing. Getting reservations has greatly reduced the cost, because we were doing pay as you go.

We did evaluate others. We evaluated AWS and looked at Google and Dell EMC, but we decided on CDW.

We went with CDW because the relationship was already established. We were working with Dan already. He was great and it just seemed like a perfect match. We just took advantage of that relationship.

I highly recommend them based on our experience. We have been fortunate enough to have a good team in place with them. We have great relationships with Brian and Dan. For whom, I can only give high praise.

CDW Billing and Budget Advisor is a nice-to-have. Now, I can go and see how much our costs are per category. However, there are times where I want to see how much I am paying for disks, VMs, network, and manage disks. That is good to see here. It gives us an idea of where some of the money is going.

Our expectations have been met in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their proactive alerting is valuable. They'll try and apprise us of issues before they become problems. I find that very valuable.

CDW listens to and understands our goals before designing and deploying a solution. We got someone pretty outstanding who has been working in cloud for more than 10 years. I like the holistic approach, both in terms of outright infrastructure, as well as the services offered underneath it, whether it was DCT, RBS, or any of the other things. We got expert-level advice. In terms of meeting the initial goals that we presented, they hit every metric with flying colors. They have met our expectations in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec.

CDW performs pretty well from a project management standpoint. We always get a dedicated project manager for any new situation, and they manage it from end to end.

They can maybe improve the scheduling. There have been times where I wanted to schedule something, and there was a conflict on their side as to who can do it and when and why, but other than that, they have been pretty stellar.

I have been using this service for about two years.

We do plan to increase its usage. It would probably expand into more regions and availability zones.

I would rate their customer support a nine out of 10.

Positive

We didn't use any other service previously. That was our first brand into the cloud aside from Microsoft.

From the time we entered into an agreement with CDW, we were able to start using their services in a matter of weeks.

There was a bit of initial setup that was required. It was pretty straightforward except for the VPN setup, which took about a week and a half. It was mostly firewall related, and we had two or three people involved. They were firewall and network engineers and general systems engineers. Currently, two or three people from engineering are engaged with CDW Managed Cloud Services.  

We have seen a return on our investment. They take care of a lot of things for us. Otherwise, we would need to ramp up on our organizational side to handle them.

I have made use of CDWs billing and budget advisor a little bit. I put a high value on that when it comes to the overall cost of CDW Managed Cloud Services.

In regards to the cost of CDW Cloud Managed Services, when I consider the costs of engineering resources that can work in multi-cloud environments, the cost of downtime, and the cost of the time to reconcile complex bills from cloud providers, the benefit is immeasurable. It can get pretty complex pretty quickly, and having that off our plate is definitely a benefit. 

It is a little more complex than I would like, but I think that's more AWS than CDW. CDW actually saves us money in regards to the way they handle things. We get support without a six-figure commitment from the AWS side, and that's appreciated.

We looked at a few. At the time, we were really looking for one thing, and that was getting up to speed quickly.

I would definitely advise others to give it a look, especially if you're not going to be spending six figures every month. It is well worth the value as well as the quality service.

CDW services haven't helped to improve our infrastructure performance, but they gave us capabilities that could be leveraged off the cloud. They gave us capabilities that aren't available with an on-premises equivalent.

We have used CDW’s free Recommendation Engine a number of times, which shows you how much money you can save by making simple changes to your cloud configuration. It has not affected our cloud costs much because the way our systems are set up, we can't move as quickly as I would like.

I would rate CDW Managed Cloud Services a nine out of 10.

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

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

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

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

It gives us peace of mind, knowing that someone is there in case the servers go down.

Their managed services team knows that something is wrong before we do and they fix it for us. This keeps us running very smoothly without issues.

We have been using the service for 18 months.

They are constantly monitoring our environment. As we grow and need things, they have been right there to help us get it moving.

There are two of us engaging with them right now, a system integration manager and an integration and data specialist.

Every time that we have had any kind of situation, they have been right there to help us. Everything that we have asked for them thus far has been covered.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has performed great from a project management standpoint. We had set up our environment with our knowledge of how to set up the virtual servers in the cloud. They came back and did an analysis to help us with our savings. This was something we hadn't thought about, but actually helped us reduce some of the costs. The cost savings was about a third of the cost over three years.

Brian's support has been awesome.

Positive

We didn't have something before; we didn't stop using something else to get this. This is what we had from the start. We are a startup company, so we had nothing before. 

It took about two weeks from creating an agreement to using their services. We took about a week to figure out how it was going to work, then it probably took them a week to put it together.

CDW Managed Cloud Services listened to and understood our goals before designing and deploying a solution. They brought a great deal of knowledge to the table when it came to planning and designing our solution. They knew exactly what we were looking for. We had an issue with shared certificates and wanted to change that from a shared based VPN certificate into a user base. They understood and provided a solution for us right away.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has done a great job in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec.

We have used CDW’s free Recommendation Engine. That is what we use for the cost savings. It helped us find places to reduce our cloud costs.

The pricing could always come down because cost is always a factor. Our business is always looking to reduce costs while getting the best services.

We looked at AWS. We just felt that going with Azure Cloud (because we are a Microsoft house) was the way to go. We had already been working with CDW for a lot of our software and could have gone either way with them, but we chose to go the Microsoft route. 

CDW has been amazing for us in a lot of ways. This Managed Cloud Services just made sense. 

Pricing was another reason to go with Azure over AWS. I didn't really look at another cloud service provider because we were already using CDW for so many other things.

I would recommend the service because it is something that we rely on. It is almost just there. We don't really have to think about it because it is there. We don't have to increase our staff to monitor our environment, which is kind of important to me that we have somebody else who is looking at it.

I would give it nine out of 10 because there is always room for improvement.

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

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

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

CDW Managed Cloud Services is providing us with an environment where we can outfit students with multiple PCs and servers to interconnect. We're creating a VMware-type environment in the cloud where the students have 24/7 access to practicing not only their labs, but also their theoretical knowledge, in a real-world environment. The environment, in general, is where students are actually trying to break the systems that are created. As a result, we'll typically know that they have done so, in many of the scenarios, well before CDW does, and we alert them so that they quickly get on it. But sometimes they catch it, alert us, and they take care of it.

I would like to see them improve when it comes to helping develop an interface to this environment that's more user-friendly. We're introducing people to the use of a type of cloud scenario that they're not familiar with. We have to train them on and teach them how it's implemented. Having a little bit better interface would be helpful.

We have been using CDW Managed Cloud Services for about three years.

There was the engineering design side and the support side. On the engineering design side, CDW Managed Cloud Services was on top of it. Our issues were more with AWS. We're a small player compared to corporations that are vying for their attention. So Amazon was more the challenge. The CDW Managed Cloud Services team was always in there trying to resolve things and get answers to the issues ASAP. On the CDW side, it was great. It was the Amazon people who were not responsive.

From the time we entered into an agreement to use the CDW Managed Cloud Services, it took about three or four months before we were able to start using the environment we needed. But we were the first institution that came to them asking for help in setting up this particular scenario. It was a totally new environment that had not been created yet. There were a few months of construction time until it was at the point that we could start utilizing it. But we created it from scratch.

There wasn't really any type of initial setup required at our end to use CDW Managed Cloud Services. There was engineering time on the CDW and AWS sides, to help engineer and design what we wanted. But outside of that, it was just an internet user interface.

We looked into several other service providers. Ours is a unique application. It's not just cloud services, but cloud services that can be adapted to educational purposes. Some of the providers we looked at were only geared towards doing educational services, but not cloud services in a cloud environment. And some were like Amazon. The biggest factor for us was cost, and at the time, CDW Managed Cloud Services was most efficient for what we needed.

Everything has been kept to what we planned on for budgeting. CDW Managed Cloud Services has met all the requirements there, and exceeded it in some cases. The biggest thing is that they're learning and we're learning. This is something that is new for all of us. This kind of approach hasn't been done before. But CDW Managed Cloud Services has been there with us, step-by-step, all the way, getting over any hurdle that we encounter.