Enterprises are facing a growing skills IT gap that is threatening their abilities to effectively manage and modernize their existing IT infrastructures. While mainframe computing and COBOL-based applications continue to be phased out in favor of cloud-based infrastructure, many enterprises still rely on these sunset technologies to support their large operations. Even enterprises that are migrating from these legacy environments to modern deployments need IT professionals capable of supporting their full IT stacks.

Yet, hiring and retaining IT professionals with this diverse skill set is a rising challenge for IT leaders. The reality is, a growing number of experienced IT professionals are retiring every day, and next-generation IT talent is entering the workforce without the necessary knowledge to support legacy infrastructure as higher education institutions no longer prioritize these still-in-demand competencies. The result is a shrinking talent pipeline and serious skills gap that jeopardizes enterprises’ abilities to successfully support legacy technology and complete digital transformations that drive business results. This leaves IT leaders straining to find new talent with legacy skills sets to replace their aging workforces.

WEI, an innovative technology solutions provider, offers a compelling solution that addresses this disparity. Read on to discover how the WEI can help your organization bridge the widening skills gap.

The WEI Technical Apprenticeship for Diverse Candidates

WEI’s innovative service helps IT leaders hire and develop early-career IT talent to bridge the skills and diversity gaps. Our four-pronged approach delivers a highly customized process that is aligned with your specific business objectives, IT needs, and corporate culture.

Step 1: Identify the Apprenticeship Plan and Your Expectations

Our team works closely with you to understand the role you need to fill, your technology stack, and your unique requirements. From there, we will design best-in-class training focused on both technical and soft skills.

Step 2: Hire the Apprentice

WEI’s apprenticeship program identifies diverse, qualified individuals with strong theoretical backgrounds to create a talent pool for our clients. To help narrow the field of potential apprentices, all candidates are assessed against job suitability criteria specific to your business to ensure they align with your needs. Top candidates are presented to you, allowing your team to make the final decision.

Step 3: Deliver the Development Plan

WEI’s specialized engineers work directly with the chosen apprentice over a series of months, offering in-depth training and hands-on experience within your IT environment to help the apprentice acquire the necessary technical skills. Throughout the apprenticeship, you will also interact with the candidate, providing essential mentorship that will help the apprentice become a valuable asset to your organization.

Step 4: Transfer Apprentice to Full-time Employment

At the conclusion of the apprenticeship, you will have the opportunity to hire the apprentice full time. Your organization’s engagement with the candidate during the apprenticeship period offers the insight necessary to help you confidently make this decision. But, the decision is yours. There is no obligation to hire the apprentice full time.

The Value of the WEI Apprenticeship Service

To help our customers navigate emerging technologies and address their evolving business challenges, we continually provide our internal IT team with technical learning opportunities. Through our apprentice program, we are able to transfer this knowledge to fresh IT talent to help solve your technical staffing challenges and support your continued success.

Managing Entry-level Talent

Developing and managing early technical career talent is time-consuming, and in today’s fast-paced IT landscape, where resources are limited, and employees are asked to do more with less, managing performance is often overlooked. Our apprenticeship program takes this task off your hands, utilizing our seasoned engineers to train your future workforce.

Strengthening Organizational Diversity in Technical Functions

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has emerged as a critical focus for enterprises. Yet, finding diverse candidates with the appropriate qualifications can be challenging. As a minority-owned business, WEI understands the importance of inclusion and diversity of thought, gender, and ethnicity. Our apprenticeship service was purposefully designed to introduce diversity across your technical team.

Controlling Recruiting Costs

By finding upcoming talent for your organization, WEI helps you avoid expensive recruiting campaigns and time-consuming candidate interviews. This allows your IT team to remain focused on their core competencies to drive business success.

Addressing Shifting Employee Demographics

As if the recruiting process was not difficult enough, COVID-19 added a new wrinkle, decentralizing workforces from key metropolitan markets to disparate locations. This geographic diversity makes finding local talent even more challenging. WEI apprenticeship tackles this issue for you.

Bolstering Engagement and Retention

Retaining talent amidst an IT skills shortage can be challenging. However, according to one, 94% of employees would remain more loyal to a company that invested in their learning. By providing new talent with personalized attention, the WEI apprenticeship model helps individuals build a career pathway, while improving your retention rates.

Offering Upskilling Opportunities That Enrich the Existing Workforce

Technology evolves rapidly, making it difficult for IT professionals to keep pace. The WEI apprenticeship offers upskilling opportunities for the apprentice that can strengthen your entire workforce and keep your business on the cutting edge.

Final Thoughts

As your organization continues to modernize your existing infrastructure, trust the WEI Technical Apprenticeship for Diverse Candidates to find and develop next-generation talent that can support your full IT stack and continually deliver business value.

Are you ready to learn more about the Contact our team today.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, many enterprises anticipated only needing remote teams for a few weeks to maybe a couple of months. Now, two years later, it’s clear that remote and hybrid workforces are here to stay. Enterprises and employees have seen the benefits of this environment, but in order to continue supporting this model, IT teams need to consider long-term solutions to initiatives.

1. Educate your workforce and manufacture a culture of security. One of the best things you can do for your enterprise cybersecurity measures is to foster a culture of security. Don’t rely on once-a-year training. Instead, take a proactive approach with your teams. Engage in regular discussions, use humor, and be relatable. Your team is your first line of defense. If they’re on your side, it’ll be much easier to deploy new protocols.
2. Implement MFA as an important step toward zero trust. In order for your hybrid workforce to be successful, they need to be able to access job-critical information no matter where they are working from. Unfortunately, this opens the door to vulnerability. In fact, research shows that 80% of breaches are linked to stolen credentials. One way you can combat this is to implement a multifactor authorization protocol as part of a broader zero trust strategy.
3. Build enterprise cybersecurity into the way users access information, leveraging the cloud whenever possible. By combining a VPN with a SASE approach, you’re able to secure access to applications and maintain enterprise security with a distributed hybrid workforce. By using SASE with a VPN, you can leverage the benefits of the cloud, such as scalability and simplifying the IT environment, with the encryption that private networks provide.
4. Secure Office365 email against advanced threats. Email is one of the most vulnerable areas of enterprise cybersecurity. With so many users now operating in a hybrid environment, this exploitable population is more available than ever. Using a Cloud Mailbox Defense allows you to supplement your native email security measures to deliver complete visibility of inbound, outbound, and internal messages.
5. Maintain a first and last line of defense with DNS and endpoint security. As part of your enterprise cybersecurity solution with a hybrid workforce, it’s critical to maintain a multilayer approach that maintains a first and last line of defense to block malicious behavior and prevent more advanced threats from coming through. With cloud-based controls, securing remote workers is made simple and allows you to scale up and down as your needs change or add functionality as you go.

Ensure Enterprise Cybersecurity With Cisco

To make securing hybrid workforces easy, the Secure Remote Worker solution from Cisco unifies user and device protection at scale to provide complete enterprise cybersecurity. Through a combination of Cisco , , , and , this integrated solution provides IT with the visibility and control to ensure security, regardless of where your employees are working from.

Are You Interested In Cisco’s Remote Workforce Security 疯情AV?

Cisco’s remote workforce security solutions are built to create a simplified experience, which reduces complexity and strengthens operations. With products ranging from  to , you can feel confident your hybrid workforce is protected along with your most vulnerable data.

NEXT STEPS: To help create a better, well-rounded security posture that protects your enterprise and hybrid workforce, our tech brief outlines everything you need.

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Enterprises are turning to a hybrid multi-cloud environment as a solution to the modern technology challenges they are faced with. However, if not expected, this shift can be met with challenges that cause dissatisfaction and contradict the value that can be gained from it.

Implementing modern enterprise technology such as a hybrid multi-cloud solution doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. It is a process you can roll out in stages, and by tackling the important uses first, getting started is easier to manage. Taking it one step at a time allows you to quickly establish a hybrid multi-cloud presence, build on your knowledge as you go, and keep costs in check. Keep reading to discover the three uses for hybrid multi-cloud in order of deployment.

Use One: Ensuring Business Continuity

The first, and possibly the most important, use for a hybrid multi-cloud solution is ensuring your enterprise’s continuity of datacenter applications with a disaster recovery (DR)-to-cloud solution. A disaster recovery-to-cloud solution is a modern enterprise technology that satisfies distancing requirements, helps achieve SLAs, and simplifies your operations. There is no need for a secondary, geographically separated datacenter. This reduces your DR costs and complexity without sacrificing your enterprise’s security.

The predictable, automated service restoration with a hybrid multi-cloud approach to DR minimizes downtime and reduces the overall impact a disaster can have on your enterprise. The ability to host DR operations on a public cloud, or multiple public clouds, allows you to avoid extended downtime due to localized disasters.

Use Two: On-Demand Elasticity

The next use for the hybrid multi-cloud is its ability to provide on-demand elasticity. During times of high demand for your enterprise’s resources, I’m sure you, like most IT leaders, would like to use the cloud as an extension of your datacenter to support that fluctuation. But getting there isn’t always easy as there are challenges that need to be addressed first. They include:

• The need for multiple infrastructure management tools
• Time-consuming, complex, networking systems and management
• Inability to move applications as-is to the cloud

A consolidated software platform, such as what , solves these challenges for private and public clouds, making the modern enterprise technology with a hybrid multi-cloud environment simple to deploy, use, and adapt. This allows you to size your datacenter for normal workloads and draws on the cloud during peak periods of use, providing you with the flexibility to scale up and scale down on your terms.

VIDEO: 3 Use Cases for Hybrid Multi-Cloud

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Use Three: Lift And Shift

Building on the previous use, the ability to “lift and shift” falls right into place with a hybrid multi-cloud approach. There are a variety of reasons you may want to lift applications from your datacenters and shift them to the public cloud. The need to free up resources and ensure your enterprise’s continuity of datacenter applications are just two reasons. If you have teams in different geographic regions, the cloud is the best way for them to access the information they need, which is done through lifting applications from the datacenter and shifting them to the cloud.

Nutanix And The Hybrid Multi-Cloud

Thanks to Nutanix‘s hybrid multi-cloud solutions, application migration is no longer a complicated and risky task. Migration to a public cloud typically requires specialized knowledge, skillsets, and unique tools for each cloud provider. Many applications must be re-platformed or re-architected to run efficiently on a public cloud, which is a time-consuming and costly process.

Because Nutanix provides the tools to run your workloads from a single control plane on any cloud with no application re-architecting, it enables your cloud to be more agile, more scalable, and ultimately more efficient and cost-effective. Nutanix reduces the cost of deploying and operating a hybrid multi-cloud environment while increasing the productivity of your team.

Next Steps: for a free 15-minute assessment of your current hybrid strategy and design. WEI’s cloud experts can provide insightful analysis and expert perspectives on your current solutions.

The post Welcome To The Future Of Modern Enterprise Technology: Hybrid Multi-Cloud appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

The decisions you make today for your enterprise’s digital transformation journey will have lasting impacts for years to come. What may be the best solution for one organization doesn’t necessarily make it the right option for yours, and knowing this when going into the digital transformation journey can save you headaches and heartbreak. Many decisions made by enterprises are based on their needs at the time and not on long-term goals, which can cause additional issues in the future.

When choosing which options to invest in, there are multiple aspects you need to take into consideration. These factors, which we go over in this article, will help you determine the right IT infrastructure mix for your enterprise. Keep reading to find out what they are.

3 Key Factors To Determine The Mix of your IT Infrastructure

If you had the opportunity to peek into another enterprise’s IT infrastructure you would most likely discover a mix of resources including a public cloud platform or two, a private cloud, numerous on-premises servers, plus an assortment of applications connected in a wide array of ways. To help you avoid this hodgepodge of resources, here are some key considerations to help determine your IT infrastructure mix with your digital transformation journey.

1. Ask The Right Questions. The questions you need to ask should go beyond the budget. While budget is an important aspect to keep in mind, it needs to be weighed against other business goals and objectives. Some questions that may be useful are:
   • Is speed to market essential?
   • Is global expansion an enterprise goal?
   • Is being a differentiated industry leader critical to your enterprise’s definition of success?

Your answer to these and other questions can highlight your need to invest in a cloud program that requires a higher cost. Other questions you may want to consider relate to overall business goals, future enterprise objectives, how prepared your team is to deploy new solutions, and how well the new solution will fit with your existing programs.

2. Know Your Guardrails. It’s not enough to ask the right questions. You also need to know what limitations, or guardrails, you have as an enterprise. These limitations include:

• Security and compliance: Depending on the location you may be faced with special security regulations, compliances, and rules that need to be adhered to. This extends to data residency not only at a country level but also between states where the impact of placing your data in a highly regulated location can be devastating to the success of your digital transformation program and the entire enterprise.
• Culture and organization: It’s human nature to fight change. As humans, we find comfort in the familiar and routine, but growth, although it’s temporarily uncomfortable and pushes us out of that zone, is necessary. To help you determine the best IT infrastructure mix for your enterprise during the digital transformation journey, you need to gauge how receptive and skilled your staff is to handle the changes they will face. The speed of your deployment is based on the team you have built and their receptiveness.
• Process and governance: When it comes to internal processes and governance, teams that are not aligned will see the speed of deployments be greatly reduced. Understanding business needs can provide clarity around how it will structure its mix of resources.

3. The Role Technology Will Play. It makes sense to also include the tools you hope to use and how they fit in the process. The results generated from technology are directional in nature and provide a consistent framework to ask important questions. With the right tools at your service, you can build multiple scenarios that steer your enterprise toward different outcomes that reach your desired objectives.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the digital transformation process when it comes to putting together the best IT infrastructure mix for your enterprise. If you need help determining the best solutions to incorporate as part of your IT mix, WEI and HPE have your back. Contact WEI today to get started.

Next Steps: Download our white paper, “” to identify six ways to ensure operational and financial harmony for your enterprise.

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More than ever, enterprises are under pressure to not only ensure that business objectives are being met but that they are also doing so with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) in mind. In fact, their stakeholders and customers demand more transparency when reporting on their ESG goals. With this increased pressure to put environmental and sustainability initiatives in the spotlight, IT executives are looking to the cloud to meet business needs while decreasing their impact on the environment. The cloud not only provides the agility and speed to make decisions and move forward in your digital transformation goals but also aids in reaching your sustainability goals. Keep reading for three ways the cloud can help you meet your enterprise’s ESG goals.

3 Ways The Cloud Helps With ESG Goals

1. Green Equipment

   
   

In the early days of cloud computing, many were concerned that the new pieces of equipment needed to support the cloud were going to consume a large amount of energy. What has been discovered, however, is that even with the increase in data output, the amount of energy used to get that information is considerably lower in comparison to the legacy equipment. This is due to machines that are created with the world’s best sustainable and energy-saving technologies.

2. Recycle and Reuse

   
   

Legacy technology requires data centers full of equipment that consume large amounts of electricity. While a change in technology historically would result in a large amount of electronic waste by requiring new equipment, with the help of you can breathe new life into what you already have. This reduces the amount of waste going to the landfills and saves you from needing to purchase additional pieces of costly equipment, overall helping to align your budget and equipment with your ESG objectives.

3. Green Data

   
   

Being environmentally conscious goes beyond recycling and reusing physical equipment. Believe it or not, the data you gain access to through your cloud solutions will also aid in your ESG goals. By using edge and cloud computing for your enterprise, you have access to large quantities of highly valuable data at your fingertips in real-time. This enables you to reduce the time, energy, and resources spent on gathering and analyzing information. It also allows you to adjust your enterprise’s processes and procedures to better align with your ESG goals.

How Dell Technologies Can Help Your ESG Goals

As a founding member of the , Dell Technologies’ goal is to get the most out of electronic components, products, and materials. They are committed to recycling and reusing at least one piece of equipment for every product they sell to maximize full lifecycles and use safe, ethical labor practices. After you migrate to the cloud, let Dell Technologies give your equipment a fresh lease on life by refurbishing and reusing them in new ways. In 2021 alone, Dell Technologies was able to gather and use over of recycled pieces in their equipment to create a more sustainable and environmentally conscious product!

Beyond recycling legacy equipment, you’re also choosing a green cloud solution that will provide sustainable growth for your enterprise for years to come. With Dell APEX, you decide how and where to run your IT operations. You have the flexibility to select which work sites will have the smallest impact on the environment and can allow for data storage and access off-site.

If you’re ready to take your ESG goals to the next level with Dell’s APEX cloud solution, contact WEI today to get started.

Next Steps: Download our executive brief “” to learn how Dell can enable your team to work productively in a remote environment.

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