IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to provide their businesses with innovative capabilities that accelerate digital transformation. Simultaneously, they must maintain existing traditional systems with constrained budgets and reduced staff. The key to addressing these challenges is to adopt a modern infrastructure that can be seamlessly ordered, deployed, maintained, and supported. This adoption frees technology leaders to invest time and capital in designing applications and services that differentiate their company’s brand and disrupt their chosen marketplace.

When purchasing modern platforms, organizations must carefully evaluate their options. Any new infrastructure deployment must be software-defined with tightly integrated compute, storage, and network virtualization capabilities. The solution must also be able to meet or exceed the performance and availability requirements of today’s most demanding applications.

Furthermore, data centers are challenged with antiquated, inflexible management tools and manual, error-prone operational processes. It is critical that IT organizations introduce new management capabilities that are familiar enough for technical staff to operate and powerful enough to provide a high degree of automation and orchestration. When appropriate, it is preferable to integrate the globally distributed and feature-rich management services of public cloud providers to create a hybrid cloud ecosystem. This integration enables IT professionals flexibility to optimize their management landscape by augmenting or replacing existing tools when applicable with public cloud services.