In a previous era, it was possible for a CIO to confine almost all of the technology operations of his company within the walls of a data center that was directly managed, and likely owned, by that company.

But today, the data center is just one component of the hybrid cloud, an architecture that combines elements of private clouds, public clouds, and on-premise data centers. Enterprises are increasingly choosing this cloud architecture in order to maximize the performance of mission-critical applications, which benefit from the security and reliability of the private cloud and on-premise data centers, as well as the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud. The hybrid cloud helps companies manage the processing of applications from big data to payroll, service mobile and fixed users, and speed content to its consumers.