Amazon. Salesforce.com. Microsoft. Rackspace. The economics and efficiencies of the world’s largest cloud and hosting service providers are an aspiration for some in enterprise IT. Forrester interviewed many of the leading web, cloud and hosting providers and uncovered five key lessons enterprise IT can apply within its own environments.

While you do not have their scale of purchasing power, IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals can benefit by adopting their approach to infrastructure architecture and operational process. From standardization to automation, I&O professionals should use this report to learn and adopt valuable practices from the digital giants that operate IT infrastructure at scale.