As IT organizations consider their existing data center environments, they are facing challenges on multiple fronts. Many are grappling with legacy systems that can’t deliver the agility and flexibility businesses require to thrive. IT departments also face shrinking or static budgets that make it impossible to reliably meet business demands with traditional infrastructure models.

In some cases, line-of-business organizations are deploying public and hybrid cloud services that can deliver agility and flexibility to solve issues that internal IT organizations cannot yet address. However, public cloud adoption can create operational cloud silos and compliance risks. IT needs to find ways to offer services seamlessly and securely across private and public clouds.

To keep pace with escalating business demands, organizations need an agile, service-oriented IT model for data centers that leverages both their on-premises data center resources and public clouds. Not long ago, highly dynamic, available and programmatic compute, storage, network and security services could give businesses an edge over competitors. Today, these capabilities are simply table stakes in a challenging landscape. Organizations need to move forward rapidly on their journey toward an agile, flexible and modern Software-Defined Data Center environment—or risk being left behind.

Public clouds provide organizations with new opportunities to scale their operations, accelerate service delivery and reduce costs. To drive agility up and costs down, IT leaders want to institutionalize the use of public clouds. They seek to take advantage of the benefits of public clouds and enable their businesses to use them freely, making the right cloud choice based on the requirements of individual workloads. However, they want to do so in a way that prevents the emergence of cloud silos.

Organizations want a common platform to manage multiple clouds holistically—a common toolset for management, networking and security. They want visibility into the cost and performance across their multiple cloud services, they require enterprise—class security and they need an exit strategy for moving apps and workloads from any public cloud at any point.

New technologies such as cloud and mobility are rapidly changing the way people work and live, and they are having a profound impact on business strategy. A growing percentage of today’s workforce wants the flexibility, convenience and productivity that mobile solutions provide. They believe in collaborative work styles and the freedom to work from anywhere, on the devices and apps they choose.

Organizations want greater agility as well, and businesses are reinventing their processes to take advantage of mobile and cloud technologies that maximize operational efficiency and effectiveness. They’re also looking to empower their employees by delivering a superior end-user experience, regardless of where they are working and which devices they are using.

The traditional ways of managing, securing and supporting workforces, apps and data don’t always meet business needs. To embrace new opportunities and address new challenges, businesses across every industry are exploring new solutions that can help them empower a more productive, cost-effective and agile organization.

Security risks are high for businesses in every industry, and they are continuing to escalate. According to a recent study, the average total cost of a data breach increased from $3.52 million to $3.79 million in just one year (Ponemon Institute/IBM, 2015). For organizations that are embracing cloud and virtualized environments, maximum visibility and control are key to mitigating this risk.

As people, devices and objects become more connected, protecting all these connections and environments has become more critical than ever. IT organizations need to secure every interaction between users, applications and data—however and wherever they are connecting. They need to do it in an environment that is constantly changing, and increasingly dynamic. This requires IT to rethink cybersecurity and build on a virtualization foundation, moving to a new security architecture that’s intrinsic, highly granular and policy-driven.