In a recent ESG research study of IT professionals who have experience with server virtualization, respondents stated that the most important private cloud infrastructure capabilities are rapid elasticity, followed by universal network access with seamless connectivity to public cloud resources, resource pooling, on-demand self-service, and measured service. Given the fact that elasticity is the primary benefit of public cloud adoption on a large scale, it should come as no surprise that it is so highly ranked in this list of private cloud computing capabilities.

The pressure is on IT organizations to keep a constant eye on the future when it comes to maintaining competitive IT environments. It doesn’t take many conversations with CIOs to realize that in order to continue justifying their occupations, they need to ensure that their enterprises are constantly taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies, which come with hefty price tags. They must constantly consider questions such as: How much does it cost to implement a new ERP infrastructure? What about keeping up with mobile computing network challenges? And of course, there’s security, inside and outside the firewall. Virtualization and cloud computing are underlying factors for all these technology challenges.