Building a Foundation for Cloud Success
Precision Cable Assemblies turned to CDW to architect a resilient Azure environment that met the company’s goals for uptime, cost reductions and sales support.
When Precision Cable Assemblies (PCA) started working with CDW to build out a Microsoft Azure environment to host its aging enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, one thing immediately stood out to IT manager Shelley Cross: the questions that CDW’s experts asked.
“Everything was about discovery,” Cross recalls. “CDW didn’t come in like a bull in a china shop. They wanted to know, what were my priorities? How was I feeling about the current environment? What did my perfect Azure environment look like, and what did we need to do to get there?”
When Cross joined PCA in 2022, the company’s Azure migration was already underway. Company leaders wanted to reduce long-term costs, modernize operations and more effectively support the sales team by moving the ERP system to the cloud, and the project was accelerated in part due to a ransomware attack the previous year. PCA had worked with two other partners on the project, but those engagements had hit speed bumps, and Cross asked her company leadership to partner with CDW.
Over the course of just three months, CDW implemented a secure Azure landing zone with a hub-and-spoke networking architecture, eliminated critical security vulnerabilities, and established automated patching and backup processes that gave Cross and her team full visibility into their environment’s health.
Cross had worked with CDW at previous employers, and she knew from experience that the company could not only architect a robust Microsoft Azure environment but would also communicate clearly and involve her team at every step. “I have worked with them off and on for 30 years, and they have a proven track record,” Cross says. “They do it right.”
“One thing that I was impressed with was their acceleration of our time to value.”
— Shelley Cross, IT Manager, Precision Cable Assemblies
Supporting the Sales Team
Headquartered in Brookfield, Wis., PCA produces wire harnesses for a wide range of industries, including products for construction and agricultural machinery and marine and emergency vehicles.. The organization has fewer than five full-time IT staffers to support both PCA and sister company Global Engineered Products. And every decision about infrastructure has the potential to impact not just IT uptime but also overall productivity across the business.
“This is a mission-critical application,” Cross says of the ERP system. “It touches our inventory, our financials. It’s the driving force of the company. When our salespeople need to enter an order, we can’t have the system crash.”
Brian Vandenboom, technical account manager for CDW, notes that CDW has dozens of certified Azure engineers with the expertise needed to build environments from scratch or solve problems with existing builds. “Our engineers know all of the pitfalls,” Vandenboom says. “We do this work for multiple customers on a regular basis.”
When Cross came on board, the in-progress Azure build had several critical issues. Virtual machines were shutting down at random, and when PCA brought them back online, they sometimes caused unrelated applications to crash.
“Our printers wouldn’t talk to anything because there was no hybrid component,” Cross recalls. “There was no connectivity back to the on-prem system. Nobody could get into our file server. We had 125 users tied to a single Remote Desktop Protocol server with no load balancer. We weren’t going to be any better off than we were on-prem.”
By the time of the second build, the Azure portal itself was public-facing, without a firewall or VPN in place. Architecture gaps continued to prevent the environment from supporting the business as intended.
That’s when PCA brought in CDW to help correct and manage the environment. The CDW team was unfazed. “We asked, what are the first things we should work on to make the biggest impact on your environment right now?” Vandenboom recalls. “And then, we prioritized those issues.” Since the environment was already in place, the CDW team first had to fix major security gaps — addressing firewall settings, tightening access and closing exposed front-facing IPs — before moving forward with stabilization and optimization.
75%
The portion of organizations that cite a lack of resources or expertise as a top cloud challenge
Source: Flexera, 2025 State of the Cloud Report, March 2025
A New Approach
CDW built a new hub-and-spoke Azure architecture in parallel to PCA’s existing environment, ensuring there would be no disruption to daily operations. This new environment featured hybrid connectivity, providing seamless integration between cloud and on-premises resources. Vandenboom’s team also verified licensing compliance, eliminating duplicate costs, and introduced load balancing to distribute users across multiple virtual desktops, resulting in redundancy and improved performance.
Perhaps most important, CDW made instant security enhancements. These included the introduction of firewall rules, VPN access, multifactor authentication and detailed patching schedules. All of these improvements were backed by visibility tools that gave Cross and her team clear sight into system health, licensing and update cycles.
The engagement began with comprehensive assessment and planning. “Right away, we had engineers assigned to do a full diagram of their existing Azure environment,” Vandenboom says. “So, we built out a whole diagram of what everything in their environment looks like, how it’s connected and where everything lives. Then, we built another diagram showing industry best practices and how we would have built it using hub-and-spoke architecture. We standardized on those industry best practices, and then we cleaned up anything that was outside of that configuration.”
“It was seamless,” Cross says of PCA’s engagement with CDW. “They really knew what they were doing. When we put in a ticket with CDW, it was handled quickly. And if there was any issue, all I had to do was call up Brian, and our problem was taken care of. If CDW didn’t know the answer, they would call in Microsoft, and we would have an answer within 24 hours. That kept things moving forward.”
‘Light Years Ahead’
PCA was able to go live with its new Azure environment just three months after CDW came on board. “We are light years ahead of where we were before,” Cross says. “I don’t hear the complaints from within the company that I used to hear. CDW is helping us so much across the board, both in Azure and on-premises. The build is far more stable, and CDW is actively monitoring and managing our environment.”
“One thing that I was impressed with was their acceleration of our time to value,” Cross adds. “That is what CDW has over a lot of other service providers. They understand that concept, they really do.”
Cross now meets biweekly with Vandenboom and his team to review service tickets and discuss any areas for improvement. Looking ahead, PCA plans to work with CDW to move some engineering workflows to Azure and to migrate remaining resources from its on-premises ERP system to the company’s new hub-and-spoke Azure environment.
“This is an ongoing relationship,” Vandenboom says. “I always tell customers to let us worry about Azure, so they don’t have to worry about it. They can focus on running their business.”
Cross says that CDW has “raised the bar” for what PCA expects from an IT partner. “They aren’t just a managed service provider,” Cross says. “CDW is an extension of my team.”
Calvin Hennick
Freelance Journalist
