The data center has become a core part of the modern enterprise, and automation is driving the agility and digital transformation necessary for businesses to thrive and succeed. This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature, offers an in-depth look at the decisions companies are making to improve data center efficiency—and the role automation plays in that process.

From the ebook:

The role of the traditional on-premises data center has been changing for years, as enterprise workloads have made an exodus to the cloud, and more recently to the edge of the network, in pursuit of benefits including cost savings, better performance and greater flexibility. According to analyst firm Gartner, 10 percent of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center by the end of 2018 — a figure that’s expected to rise to 80 percent by 2025. Cisco, meanwhile, predicts that by 2021, 94 percent of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centers, with just six percent processed by traditional data centers.

Still, for the next few years at least, there will be plenty of enterprise data centers housing workloads that, for whatever reason (technical, economic, security, compliance, for example), have not migrated to the cloud. A big task now facing enterprises is to assess the cloud-readiness of their on-premises application portfolios, and discover how best to make their data centers more efficient and agile engines of digital transformation by maximising the level of automation.

Some legacy workloads may remain on-premises, running on traditional IT infrastructure. Many will be modernised in various ways to run on private or hybrid cloud infrastructure, while others may exit the enterprise data center altogether to run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or other hyperscale public clouds. Placing workloads on the most appropriate infrastructure, and managing them efficiently wherever they end up, is the strategic roadmap for many CIOs.

Automation will play a key role in all this, and will be greatly helped by the advent of the software-defined data center (SDDC) in which virtualised compute, storage and networking resources are orchestrated via a layer of management software.