IT and application architectures have changed significantly in the past decade as cloud, big data, and mobile computing have disrupted business processes and applications. Cloud computing offers a particularly attractive value proposition: It gives organizations of all sizes the ability to leverage IT resources as needed.

When data center investment is a concern or IT is an enabler but not a core business, cloud-based services can allow organizations to scale effectively via hosted applications, or infrastructure-as-a-service. Organizations also are building their own next-generation data center infrastructure in order to benefit from the cost-efficiencies, flexibility, and scale that a cloud provides.