IT has always been a profession of change. We moved from mainframes to minicomputers
to superminis. We moved to PCs, and then to client/server. We added LANs, and then the
Internet. Now we have distributed clouds, mash-ups, multi-cloud, and hybrid IT.
The constant change makes sense, because we’re always trying to solve bigger problems, respond with more speed, store more data, and yet spend less.

Business challenges have spurred an evolution in technology, which has given rise to new
opportunities and operating models. Virtualization and server consolidation helped reduce floor space, power, and cooling costs. Pay-as-you-use services and self-service infrastructure helped manage costs. Automation helped us do more with less grunt work. The rise of public and private cloud services helped us scale on-demand, rather than over provisioning for unpredictable inevitabilities.

But all these capabilities, and even the newfound flexibility of it all, had a hidden price. Managing it is not easy. No longer do we have one company or vendor to contact when something goes wrong. We have a mix of infrastructure, software and service, hardware, and cloud providers, and all those other services we bought simply by providing a credit card number.

How do we manage all those environments? How do we make sure our data is properly
managed, protected, or even in a legal governing jurisdiction we trust? What do we do about all the employee logins and authentication? What do we do about security across all that complexity?

We think we have some answers. That’s in the rest of this guide.