Enterprises worldwide are embracing a digital work style to stay competitive in a dynamic and increasingly global business environment. This work style requires that teams collaborate seamlessly across organizations and time zones, while success relies on speed, mobility, and connectivity.

These trends place ever-increasing pressure on IT departments to provide rich, connected capabilities across the infrastructure, while protecting both the environment and its confidential data from intrusion and disruption. The explosion of social networks and communication devices, and the exponential growth of information stored, accessed, and shared create an environment where compliance is daunting, security is threatened, and complexity becomes overwhelming.

Virtualization has gained much attention across organizations looking to address these challenges, improving the efficiency of their IT operations and enhancing their responsiveness to changing conditions. Originally focused on consolidating resources in the data center, virtualization now has applications across the IT spectrum, driving down costs and improving agility. This paper looks at the role virtualization should take in an optimized IT infrastructure, and presents a set of principles and best practices to help you build a comprehensive virtualization strategy for your organization.