CDW Managed Cloud Services Reviews

CDW Managed Cloud Services was used as an internal sub-support for a SaaS platform.

What I like most about CDW Managed Cloud Services is that it is short and concise. That was the important thing because there was so much for us to do. It wasn't about bling, it wasn't about millions and trillions of options. It was about getting the configs in place, getting directly to the information we need when we need it, and then getting back focused on being profitable. A lot of companies have a lot of what you call "bling," industry bling. That wasn't what I liked about this tool. I thought this tool was a lot cleaner. Get what you need and get out.

When it comes to scalability, we never got to the point where we could scale it, or at least while I was there. Scalability is a tricky word. You design for it, but to actually do it because you have a real need tends to take more time to come into fruition. I wasn't there when that scalability test was done.

In terms of using the real-time performance analytics feature of CDW Managed Cloud Services, I think it was something a little different when I was working with it. Maybe it was termed differently. We had a real-time interaction performance report that we dealt with every day. Our goal was to have the tool create information and send it to us instead of us having to look for it. We used a real-time monitoring service functionality to generate a daily report, which my SMEs would then review and take actions in accordance as necessary.

When assessing CDW's security management in maintaining data integrity and compliance, you meet the encrypt state compliance requirements and the ISO 9000, which we had requirements for, including the ISNet requirements with the 128-bit encryption states and 512s on the backend for hardware. We didn't have anything else beyond that, which is pretty standard these days. We had no data penetrations during the time I was there.

What I dislike about CDW Managed Cloud Services is that sub-configurations are somewhat of a headache. Setting it up could be easier when it comes to integrating it to these API environments that it's going to co-work with. That's principally the only thing I had a problem with. I only did it a couple of times. We then handed it off to SMEs who do nothing but that, so it probably is more of my failure than the tool's failure.

I have been working with CDW Managed Cloud Services for three years.

Regarding the stability of CDW Managed Cloud Services, I have only seen issues at the beginning, mostly because of our own mistakes. It was a fairly stable, functional service once we had it in place. I hadn't seen anything that was an issue. It was good.

When it comes to scalability, we never got to the point where we could scale it, or at least while I was there. Scalability is a tricky word. You design for it, but to actually do it because you have a real need tends to take more time to come into fruition. I wasn't there when that scalability test was done.

As for technical support or customer support from CDW, my team has interacted with them.

I have not tried using any alternatives to CDW Managed Cloud Services, though we did use DataDog.

The initial deployment for CDW Managed Cloud Services was not easy, but once you get the hang of it, it became easier. I have had some difficult nightmares with other platforms that were just mind-numbingly daunting to set up. You have to understand how you guys want it done when you're doing the configurations. That's what we did not have under our belt. Once we figured it out, it was easier to support.

For deployment of CDW Managed Cloud Services, you cannot do it alone. Single points of failure are not advisable. Anyone who does single points of failures needs to understand that this basically means you have an environment that is specialized for an individual. You don't want to do that. You want to make sure that you're building a team of people, and they add a level of expertise a single person doesn't have because you only get one aspect of the job when you just have a single person there. Of course, you're at risk because of the fact that you are dealing with a problem with a single point of failure. If that person quits and moves on, which happens every three to five years, you're sitting in a hole with nothing in your capacity. Who's your backup? That's basically how we think about it in regards to making sure you plan for the code as well as the use of the tool or the code, because you can't afford to have one person be your single cog that can break the machine.

Regarding the pricing, I wasn't involved with the pricing for the platform we worked with because that was much higher up. I was involved with price structuring as an operations director for TradeCentric. It wasn't within our reach. Some tools are not superbly well-built to be small enterprise or small- to mid-size. Pricing-wise, it would be nicer if it was more reachable by smaller companies.

I have not tried using any alternatives to CDW Managed Cloud Services, though we did use DataDog.

Overall, I would give CDW Managed Cloud Services a score of 7.8. It still needs more work, at least from what I was seeing. I would rate this review an 8.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

My main use case for CDW Managed Cloud Services is for cloud infrastructure management, cloud migration, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, and operational support. CDW Managed Cloud Services is used for managing virtual machines and cloud resources. CDW Managed Cloud Services is also used for backup and disaster recovery services and is mainly used for cloud operation management.

In my day-to-day work, I manage virtual machines, VMs, and cloud resources. I also use CDW Managed Cloud Services for backup and disaster recovery services. CDW Managed Cloud Services is used day-to-day in 24/7 monitoring and incident management and is also used in hybrid and multi-cloud operations.

For example, an organization uses CDW Managed Cloud Services to monitor cloud virtual machines, manage backups, and handle day-to-day cloud operations for business applications. CDW Managed Cloud Services is mainly used for managed cloud operations, infrastructure, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud support.

The best features that CDW Managed Cloud Services offers include 24/7 monitoring support, which provides continuous monitoring and incident management. In compliance and security monitoring, CDW Managed Cloud Services supports governance and resilience. Furthermore, in managed cloud operations, it provides cloud administrations and optimizations, business continuity support, backup, and disaster recovery. CDW actively monitors cloud workloads and proactively manages incidents before service disruptions.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has impacted my organization very positively. I have observed several positive impacts, including reduced operational overhead, improved cloud performance and reliability, better security and compliance posture, and enhanced business continuity.

CDW Managed Cloud Services can be improved in many ways, specifically in terms of operational efficiency, better management of cloud operations, and reduced manual efforts. Improved uptime and availability, faster incident response and proactive monitoring, along with improved incident management for faster issue detection and resolution would be beneficial. With 24/7 monitoring and managed support, my organization has improved uptime and reduced operational workload.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has improved operational efficiency, cloud visibility, uptime, and incident management through proactive monitoring and managed support.

I have been using CDW Managed Cloud Services for five years.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is stable.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is scalable and can support organizations of different sizes by adapting cloud operations, monitoring, and managed services based on business growth and infrastructure needs. As an organization expands its cloud workloads or adds new environments, CDW can extend monitoring, support, and operational management accordingly.

Customer support is available 24/7, and they provide good support.

Before using CDW Managed Cloud Services, I was using different solutions like IBM Cloud Services. I chose CDW Managed Cloud Services because it provides good management along with hybrid and multi-cloud capability.

CDW Managed Cloud Services provides ROI by reducing internal cloud management efforts, improving uptime, and optimizing cloud operations. It has also saved money and time, and my organization is hiring fewer employees for cloud services. My organization has reduced downtime and avoids hiring large in-house cloud operations teams, thus delivering ROI through operational efficiency, reduced downtime, cloud optimization, and managed service support.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, CDW Managed Cloud Services pricing is generally customized based on company requirements, cloud environment size, services selected, and the support model. The setup cost depends on migration, onboarding, integrations, and the operational scope. For example, a company with a larger hybrid infrastructure and 24/7 monitoring needs will have a higher managed service cost.

Before choosing CDW Managed Cloud Services, I evaluated other options like Deloitte cloud consulting and managed services, Rackspace technology, managed cloud operations, and multi-cloud support devices.

I advise and recommend CDW Managed Cloud Services to others, as it is a good cloud service platform. The 24/7 monitoring, incident management, and technical cloud support help organizations maintain cloud operations efficiency. I encourage others looking for CDW Managed Cloud Services to consider it.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is a very good platform for cloud management, helping organizations maintain cloud operations efficiently. There is also support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and they provide continuous monitoring and operational support. They have dedicated managed services teams and available cloud operations expertise. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

CDW Managed Cloud Services has been in use at our organization for four months. The main use case is that it provides 24/7 services with ITIL-based management of hybrid and multi-cloud environments to optimize performance, security, and cost. The service provides proactive monitoring, maintenance, and expert support, acting as an extension of internal IT teams to allow focus on innovation.

Our organization uses many cloud services providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The primary purpose for CDW Managed Cloud Services is to integrate all of these providers into a single platform, ensuring all their services are used correctly and within the proper timeframe. The service validates all offerings and provides visibility into all available services across our cloud providers.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is used across all of our projects and provides managed public cloud, managed hybrid infrastructure, managed security and AI, cloud migration and optimization, backup, and disaster recovery. CDW Managed Cloud Services maintains all cloud provider services, including features and management of public cloud. It provides proactive maintenance, monitoring, and reporting for AWS, Azure, and Microsoft 365. The service also manages hybrid infrastructure to balance on-premises control with cloud flexibility, and manages security and AI to secure data and apps, including AI workload optimization.

CDW Managed Cloud Services provides managed cloud, managed public cloud, managed hybrid infrastructure, managed security and AI, cloud migration and optimization, backup, and disaster recovery. The standout feature is cloud migration and optimization, as it provides expert assessment, planning, and migration to public or hybrid environments.

Cloud migration and optimization is particularly valuable because our organization uses multiple cloud services including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This feature helps us maintain all of their features, offerings, and services while integrating them into a single platform. Cloud migration and optimization provides expert assessment and planning of all aspects, with migration to public or hybrid environments based on the organization's needs. This feature helps our team positively manage all of these aspects.

Another important feature is backup and disaster recovery. This feature provides managed BAAS and backup services that allow us to recover data securely and smoothly in the event of data loss from cyber attacks or other incidents. This is critical for our organization, as we can recover data smoothly and securely with this feature in any scenario.

Since using CDW Managed Cloud Services, we have noticed improvements in reduced complexity, enhanced security, and cost management. Reduced complexity simplifies management of complex multi-cloud setups, which is important since we use multiple different cloud services providers. Cost management provides continuous optimization to control cloud spending across the different cloud services our organization uses, resulting in cost savings.

There are not many challenges with CDW Managed Cloud Services. However, there are a few extensions that felt hard to integrate into our organization's setup. The expert team and expert support provided by CDW Managed Cloud Services helped us integrate those extensions easily and smoothly into our organization's setup so that we can focus more on innovation and our IT team can direct more focus toward innovation.

CDW Managed Cloud Services could provide more detailed documentation for their services, expert support, and all of the benefits they provide. More detailed documentation through presentations or other means could help our organization think about services in a more significant and positive way. It would also make our decision-making process smoother and easier.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is very stable. We are receiving the benefits of their services and using them to manage all of our cloud services providers in a single platform while integrating all of them into one system. It has remained very stable throughout our usage.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is very scalable. We currently use two or three cloud services providers including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and the service scales very well for all of them. In the future, when we add more cloud services providers to our organization, the service should scale appropriately. The current scalability of CDW Managed Cloud Services is sufficient for any number of cloud services providers. As we currently use two or three cloud services, it scales very well for that volume. In the near future, if we decide to scale up further, we can scale it up more easily and smoothly with the help of their expert team and support.

We have not been engaged in any situation that required us to reach out to their support team. All of their services are working well, so we did not get the opportunity to contact their support team.

We were not using any other cloud management services previously. We switched directly to CDW Managed Cloud Services.

We did not evaluate any other options. We switched directly to CDW Managed Cloud Services.

My advice to others is that if you are looking for a platform to manage your public cloud, hybrid infrastructure, and security and AI, and you want to perform cloud migration and optimization while also receiving backup and disaster recovery features, CDW Managed Cloud Services delivers benefits including reduced complexity, enhanced security, and cost management. I would recommend switching directly to CDW Managed Cloud Services. I rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is used for cloud operations, which can be run, optimized, and secured simultaneously, and to upscale the cloud environment across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

I use CDW Managed Cloud Services for cloud operations in my environment by hosting it in the public cloud, which helps me to get support from the environment spanning AWS, Microsoft, and Google. It also assists with cloud migration, physical to virtual, virtual to physical, database migrations, and everything related to cloud management.

CDW Managed Cloud Services offers excellent features such as 24/7 monitoring and support, hybrid and multi-cloud management, cloud migration services, cloud optimization, security and compliance, and infrastructure services.

Out of the features I mentioned, cloud migration has made the biggest difference for my team because it helps me transition from one cloud to another or from a virtual cloud to the physical cloud. It saves time as well.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has positively impacted my organization through its key capabilities, which include compliance and security. The migration services, cloud optimization, and cost management have helped me significantly.

While using CDW Managed Cloud Services, I can see how many dollars I can save while downloading the data from the cloud or transferring it to a different cloud, examining if it is necessary, evaluating the costing options, and determining whether automations can be performed, which has helped me tremendously.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is performing very well overall, but the optimization can be improved in terms of loading the page. The user-friendly dashboard takes a little bit of time to load, which can be improved.

I feel it is not quite a 10 because of the loading issue while jumping from one page to another or from one service to another—there is a slight lag that can be improved. This is a minimal thing that can be improved by the development team.

I have been using CDW Managed Cloud Services for two years.

My advice for others looking into using CDW Managed Cloud Services is to use it once, and you will see the difference. I rate this product 9 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

CDW Managed Cloud Services is a third-party service provider offering services for design, migrate, manage, monitor, and optimize cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, GCP, or hybrid setups. We use CDW Managed Cloud Services for cloud setup, including the setup of our Azure infrastructure for workload migration, application modernization, and hybrid cloud setup. We also use CDW Managed Cloud Services for 24/7 monitoring of services, and we have used it for security and compliance purposes to improve our security and compliance services, cost optimizations, and support between us and the cloud service provider.

A recent project where CDW Managed Cloud Services played a key role involved our Azure environment, where we host our VMs. We use CDW to oversee the migration process, set up our Azure AVD environment, implement our security and compliance solution such as the implementation of Sentinel, and optimize our security solution, including how Sentinel conducts quality checks and how Sentinel integrates with Azure. Additionally, it provides us with ways to mitigate our costs. CDW Managed Cloud Services acts as a bridge between us and Azure.

Regarding how we work with CDW Managed Cloud Services, we use CDW to raise cases with Microsoft whenever there is an outage. We do not go directly to Microsoft; we first work through the issues with CDW, and if the issue is not solved, then we escalate to Microsoft. CDW Managed Cloud Services is a bridge that saves our contract timing with Microsoft, so it is not only a cloud service provider but also a bridge between us and Microsoft. If we cannot fix an issue, we go to CDW, and if CDW cannot fix it, then we go to Microsoft. This approach saves us costs and effort.

CDW Managed Cloud Services offers several valuable features, including diversification as it is not a single cloud service provider. For instance, it provides continuous monitoring of our cloud infrastructure. It helps us design our cloud solution not just for Azure but also for planning to migrate to AWS, with CDW Managed Cloud Services being available for that. It is not merely a service provider but acts as a partner that gives us proactive monitoring support, helps us with cost optimization, and assists us in designing security and compliance management solutions.

Proactive monitoring and cost optimization features have helped us specifically because CDW Managed Cloud Services watches our cloud infrastructure for Azure, and if there is any outage, it tracks servers, applications, storage, and networks, identifying problems based on CPU spikes, memory issues, and failures before users notice. Their immediate response fixes issues quickly through automated solutions or expert engineer advice, with a 24/7 team available to help us. CDW Managed Cloud Services acts as a security guard and doctor for my cloud.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has positively impacted our organization by increasing productivity since CDW has designed our cloud infrastructure, helped us migrate, and set up our cloud solution. The 24/7 proactive monitoring support provides us with higher system availability, faster issue resolution, improved security, and cost savings, reducing our IT workload and delivering better performance. Proactive monitoring enhances system availability, reduces downtime, improves security, and allows our IT team to focus on core business activities.

CDW Managed Cloud Services can be improved in several ways. Currently, we have to go to them for our services. If their 24/7 monitoring team could implement AI-related solutions to analyze past issues and outages, that would help our L2 level team. Additionally, having a dashboard or better reporting features would assist us in determining outages, costs, and future designs. Implementing reporting and AI solutions will improve their services.

Operationally, needed improvements include having customization and flexibility since standard service tiers may not fully fit all our needs. If they could provide customization service options and improve response time for non-critical issues, it would be beneficial. Also, having a unified dashboard for multi-cloud visibility and control along with advanced AI automation adoption will make a difference.

We have been using CDW Managed Cloud Services for the last six years.

My advice to others looking into using CDW Managed Cloud Services is that if you want a better cloud-managed solution and are planning to purchase a solution that is 24/7 available for monitoring, cost-effective, has a team that can handle multi-cloud issues, can provide you with a better option, and can bridge the gap between vendors and you to fix complex issues, which also provides a 99.9% SLA, I suggest you consider CDW Managed Cloud Services.

Specific metrics of positive impacts include that CDW Managed Cloud Services has saved our SLA and MTTR. The uptime and availability are at 99.9%, and our MTTR has reduced to below one hour. This improvement has significantly impacted our SLA, and our MTTD is now two minutes, which is quite impactful.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is a bridge between vendors and us, monitoring our infrastructure continuously with proactive support and cost optimization, delivering high availability and reducing downtime for better performance. I have given this review an overall rating of 9.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

CDW Managed Cloud Services is our main support solution, which includes Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform support. As a cloud operations model, we work on NOC and SOC support for ITIL.

CDW Managed Cloud Services offers managing cloud services, which provides design, migration, management, and security, optimizing the cloud environment across public and private hybrid platforms, covering the full lifecycle from cloud assessment to onboarding and monitoring as well as cost optimizations and security compliance.

I find myself relying mostly on migration and managing security, as well as optimizing cloud environments across hybrid platforms.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has positively impacted my organization by reducing costs, being more efficient and secure to use, and offering a user-friendly platform that gives quick access to all features in a single cloud service portal.

CDW Managed Cloud Services needs to work on the costing for the license part, making it more affordable would be beneficial.

I chose eight out of ten because there are some minimal things they need to work on, such as reducing the licensing costs and providing more value-added services.

I have been working for the past nine years.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is stable.

The scalability of CDW Managed Cloud Services is quite good. It is comfortable to use and has a structured process where the scalability is far good.

The customer support is good, and they work in different time zones.

This is the only solution we have been using for the past four years. This is the one I joined the company with, and it is the first.

For setup, the type of customer we have uses CDW Managed Cloud Services, from mid-market to enterprise organizations. Industries such as healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing clients use it. Organizations also use this to migrate cloud or optimize existing systems.

We have saved almost $350,000 from the overall budget, and during vacations, we have saved significantly this quarter as well as in previous projects, making the process completely new and seamless. The efficiency has improved from 70% to almost around 80% due to this cloud service.

The management of pricing approvals is mostly handled by top management. We have $350,000 as per the approval process.

I advise others looking into using CDW Managed Cloud Services to definitely go for it because if they are in a hybrid model, this is the best model that offers comfortable features, all accessible from a single go-to portal. Everything is good. I gave this review a rating of eight out of ten.

Private Cloud

Microsoft Azure

I use CDW Managed Cloud Services for vendor management across Microsoft Azure, Exchange Online, and on-premises infrastructure. CDW manages our infrastructure support before escalating issues to Microsoft.

We engaged CDW Managed Cloud Services to design and execute a mobile device management migration from a different platform to Microsoft Intune. The transition and post-migration support went quite well.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is used frequently for all types of projects because their engineers are L3 level and very supportive. When we need to migrate from one data center to another or design a plan, we raise a proactive service ticket with them and receive a solution. They not only provide the solution but also support us during the migration if any issues occur.

CDW Managed Cloud Services acts as a gateway between us and Microsoft. They provide highly technical resources, which saves us from going to Microsoft frequently and reduces costs since Microsoft support depends on hours purchased. By using CDW Managed Cloud Services, we save on Microsoft hours and this benefits the business overall.

We were in a P2 situation with limited options and considered raising a case with Microsoft directly. Since we had a CDW Managed Cloud Services contract, we raised the case through them instead. CDW engineers joined the call and resolved the issue in three hours, which saved us three hours of Microsoft support time, reduced costs, and minimized outage time.

Their portal offers a unique feature where you do not need to call CDW Managed Cloud Services support every time. If you need escalation or immediate support, the ticket has an escalation option where you input your details and receive a call within two minutes, along with an email. They are proactive and responsive for any open cases.

CDW Managed Cloud Services has helped us with numerous upgrades and conducted health checks and security assessments for our organization at no additional cost. They support us not only as a vendor management provider but also as a partner.

They conducted a security assessment and suggested steps for improvements, explaining the potential outcomes if we implement those recommendations. This guidance has been helpful.

CDW Managed Cloud Services needs to implement a chatbot and enhance their AI capabilities. The tools are fairly straightforward, but they need more advanced features. A chatbot integrated with better documentation would be beneficial. If we encountered the same issues in the past, we could resolve those issues using the chatbot and implement solutions ourselves without raising new tickets.

They need to focus more on chatbot implementation, improve documentation, and integrate the chatbot with their documentation system. Additionally, whenever there is any outage in Microsoft or Microsoft vulnerabilities, they need to add that information to their portal. Integrating all outage-related and change-related information from Microsoft into their portal would be valuable.

I have been using CDW Managed Cloud Services for the past ten years, and we are quite satisfied with the service.

CDW Managed Cloud Services is stable.

CDW Managed Cloud Services scales based on our needs.

The customer service is responsive and helpful.

Earlier, we were opening tickets directly with Microsoft. Then we switched to CDW Managed Cloud Services.

The costs are not excessive and very competitive. We are satisfied with the pricing.

CDW Managed Cloud Services was the market leader, so we chose them over alternatives.

Other providers need to be price competitive and their technical support should be top-notch as it is with CDW Managed Cloud Services. CDW Managed Cloud Services is a reseller. I have not offered any recommendations yet. The overall review rating for CDW Managed Cloud Services is eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

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.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

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.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure