Nowadays, competition in every industry is fierce. Technology has been breaking down traditional geographic barriers. Product life cycles are shrinking. Increasingly, access to information is becoming a key corporate differentiator. Many very successful businesses were built on – and now rely upon – premises-based solutions.

These systems were designed before cloud technology emerged, so their infrastructure is from yesteryear, which creates several challenges. IT departments manage a wide and evergrowing array of autonomous silos: hardware, network devices, storage solutions, and a rapidly increasing number of applications.

As a result, the IT staff spends a lot of time on routine maintenance: configuring devices, updating software, allocating storage, and monitoring network traffic.