In recent years, innovation in networking, virtualization, compute, and storage technologies has allowed IT organizations to streamline and scale in the global marketplace by centralizing resources in the data center and cloud. However, the benefits of centralization have resulted in greater complexity in the branch office, where IT has had to compensate for poor application performance over the WAN. This situation has contributed to rising capital and operational expenditure, not only reducing IT productivity but also stifling business agility, flexibility, and innovative abilities.

This paper discusses how you can support a distributed enterprise with lean IT through consolidation of servers, storage, and networking resources that can be shared by multiple applications and managed collectively using policy-led processes.