Operators of enterprise data centers face a rapidly evolving technology landscape and a cloud-powered wave of disruption that is changing business models, connectivity, workload management and much more. Driving this change is the growing availability and adoption of opex-based ‘off-premises’ services, such as public cloud, X-as-a-service and colocation data center offerings. Yet not all workloads are being, or can be, outsourced. This means that operators are increasingly managing ‘hybrid’ IT environments – that is, a mix of off-premises services and privately owned, internal ‘on-premises’ data center capacity.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities. However, this isn’t easy. With a hybrid IT environment can come complexity, confusion, and even infrastructure fragmentation. And, if you leave this poorly managed, your users, business, and most of all customers will certainly start to notice.