Maximizing Infrastructure Investments
With CDW Extended Support, organizations can continue to get value from their firewalls and data center infrastructure, even after vendors stop supporting the equipment.
It’s a scenario that happens all the time: An organization spends a lot of money on hardware, the equipment is still running great after several years, and then it ages out of vendor support.
At this point, IT and business leaders basically have two options. They can refresh their equipment, spending a significant sum to replace what still seems like perfectly good infrastructure. Or they can try to keep using their hardware without support from the original equipment manufacturer.
CDW Extended Support makes it possible for businesses to take the second route. Often, we’ll advise organizations to repurpose their out-of-support infrastructure for use cases that aren’t critical to their mission, and then we can provide a single point of contact, onsite support and multiple service levels to help them extend the life of their investments.
Eliminate Complexity with a Single Point of Contact
No more searching for the support line of multiple vendors when problems pop up — CDW Extended Support gives organizations a single point of contact. Additionally, CDW provides end-to-end ownership of all incidents, service requests and support for maintenance and hardware replacement.
CDW Extended Support covers most major data center infrastructure vendors and Palo Alto Networks firewalls. Organizations can also choose to cover both their supported and out-of-support technologies through a mix of CDW Technology Support and CDW Extended Support. Say, for instance, that a large company has a mix of Palo Alto firewalls of different generations; that company could obtain service through CDW Technology Support for its newer gear, and then those same firewalls would be covered by CDW Extended Support when they are no longer supported by the original equipment manufacturer.
Support Tailored to Your Organization’s Needs
Different businesses need different types of support. CDW Extended Support offers two options to help organizations meet their response time needs, and customers can mix and match support levels across their covered equipment.
At the top support level, the service desk is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, with a four-hour response time. At the lower level, the service desk is available from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Central Time each day, with a next-business-day response time.
CDW Shores Up Its Onsite Service Offerings
It’s worth noting that CDW acquired Sirius Computer Solutions (now called Sirius, a CDW Company) late last year. While CDW performed onsite extended support before this acquisition, we now have an even more robust staff of engineers to help our extended support customers.
CDW Extended Support offers full onsite service. Our technicians begin by conducting remote troubleshooting, which often yields quick answers. When that process does not successfully diagnose the problem, we send someone to the customer’s physical site. If either remote or onsite troubleshooting determines that a device needs to be repaired or replaced, we send out an engineer with a replacement part or device. The engineer swaps out the broken item onsite and makes sure the infrastructure gets back up and running.
Story by Gretchen Everhart
