CDW Managed Cloud Services Reviews

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 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.

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'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.