IT modernization requires multiple solutions and capabilities across automation, cloud-native technologies, application modernization and integration. A partner with expertise in these areas can help organizations take a holistic, unified approach to IT modernization and software development acceleration. With experience across all the leading platforms and technologies, CDW has helped hundreds of customers achieve digital velocity through customized engagements that take a strategic approach to needs, opportunities and challenges in a specific environment.

A comprehensive approach is important because it allows organizations to apply strategy to modernization. Understanding how a modernization effort will enable advanced capabilities helps leaders align IT investments with business objectives to ensure they achieve desired outcomes. While modern environments are inherently advantageous based on their increased efficiency, productivity and security, they also deliver value through the capabilities they enable, including automation, AI and API management. An expert partner can help organizations connect the dots between their solutions, capabilities and objectives to chart the most effective and efficient path forward.

DIGITAL VELOCITY FACTORY: CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory is a system for using automation, cloud-native technologies and lean practices to modernize IT for faster software deployment and recoveries, with fewer failures. Rooted in DevOps and agile software development, it helps organizations establish software development pipelines that leverage automation, AI and standardization for maximum efficiency and quality. By reducing errors, quality issues and security vulnerabilities, a Digital Velocity Factory allows the organization to spend more time developing new capabilities and refining existing products. While the business case for digital velocity is clear, organizations are often unsure how to achieve these capabilities. Partnering with CDW can help organizations attain meaningful benefits sooner by assessing needs, prioritizing modernization efforts and charting a roadmap for success.

DEVOPS ASSESSMENT: A DevOps practice helps organizations bridge the gaps between development and operational teams and processes so they can leverage advanced capabilities such as Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and application modernization. Typically, organizations have varying strengths and weaknesses across the three primary capabilities that facilitate speed across DevOps processes: automation, agile approaches and cloud-native technologies. CDW’s DevOps Assessment helps organizations identify areas of maturity, opportunities for improvement and impediments that may slow down development, and provides a roadmap for improvement based on industry patterns and best practices.

Software development is a core enterprise capability. Digital velocity helps organizations mature this capability so they can develop faster while reducing errors.

SPEED AND INNOVATION: Achieving digital velocity is an opportunity for organizations to do more with their application development processes. Largely, that is driven by increasing teams’ productivity so they can deliver more throughput. Higher productivity, in turn, helps to alleviate some of the pressure that is continuously facing IT and business leaders to transform and innovate. Accelerating software engineering processes through digital velocity has a direct connection on the digital capabilities, products and services the organization can deliver to its customers and internal users.

MODERNIZATION BENEFITS: Organizations running on outdated applications will encounter frequent breakages, excessive downtime and the challenge of retaining the necessary skill sets to maintain legacy systems. Modernizing applications eliminates these difficulties while enabling many of the digital transformation initiatives that organizations prioritize today. It allows for the exploration of new revenue streams, reduced technology costs, stronger security for applications, greater ease of cloud technology adoption and increased visibility across the IT environment.

STAFFING FLEXIBILITY: Outdated technologies can lead to an overreliance on individual employees’ institutional knowledge, which creates risk. Such technologies also inhibit organizations’ ability to attract and retain strong talent, who are likely to prefer employers that allow them to work with cloud-native infrastructure, automation, AI and other advanced technologies. Modernized environments can help organizations gain an edge in talent recruitment and ensure that important knowledge does not rest solely with one individual.

AI EFFICIENCIES: Operations teams are often overwhelmed with the breadth and depth of monitoring activities. This is especially the case when these processes rely on outdated or poorly integrated systems that require reactive management and manual troubleshooting. By contrast, modernized environments can take advantage of AI to detect anomalies and issue alerts to staffers. In more mature operations, AI-enhanced automation tools use contextual data to recognize that a specific anomaly has occurred previously and resolve it again using the same resolution. These capabilities increase efficiency and quality and enable organizations to identify problems proactively before they begin to affect customers or end users.