Virtualization technologies provide tremendous value to the data center by consolidating underutilized assets, simplifying provisioning, and offering greater flexibility. Enterprises are accelerating their virtualization deployments to boost their return on investment and improve the agility of data center infrastructure.

To realize the full benefits of virtualization for their data center infrastructure, IT organizations must have an integrated, holistic virtualization strategy—one that adapts existing operational processes and procedures, addresses the need to manage both physical and virtual infrastructure consistently, and helps develop the new skills needed to leverage virtualization’s potential.

EMC recommends implementing virtual infrastructure best practices to minimize risk and optimize costs. Successful virtualization initiatives leverage early implementations and address the impact of virtualization on backup, disaster recovery, networking, energy efficiency, and resource management.

Keeping these operational aspects in mind not only assures a successful virtualization initiative, but improves the flexibility and agility of IT operations. Additionally, this approach sustains data center transformation momentum by increasing efficiency and delivering cost benefits to drive further initiatives.

It’s hard for IT organizations to be flexible and agile when their processes and skill sets are constrained by the demands of existing applications. When infrastructure is structured to support specific applications, the result is a set of disconnected “silos” lacking economies of scale and shared best practices.

As IT is increasingly asked to become strategic and do more with less, the need for change becomes imperative. How can you embrace strategic change while still meeting the demands of current applications? How do you get enterprise-wide efficiencies while still meeting requirements of specific lines of business?

You need a fresh approach. EMC recommends taking a step back to look at service-level requirements across the enterprise. First, think about the service requirements that your stakeholders are demanding. Then, compile these requirements into a catalog of IT services. Finally, map applications into service tiers.

By viewing data centers as providers of IT services instead of clusters of separated application infrastructures, you fundamentally enhance the value of IT to the business.  Instead of perceiving IT as a supplier of components with allocated costs, your business stakeholders view IT as a strategic partner, helping to make the right cost-benefit decisions for a rapidly changing world.

As the value of your information infrastructure grows, so does your concern with protecting these assets from loss, theft, or misuse. Ensuring that information is highly available and recoverable is increasingly important. But business stakeholders who worry about the costs of protection may not understand the risks you face.

Even though the gap between current and required security, availability, and disaster recovery service levels can be wide and growing, it’s all too easy to settle for incremental changes and hope that the unexpected doesn’t happen.

The transformation of protection from a cost into a business enabler requires a different approach. First, take a hard look at the risks to your information and make sure you have a solid understanding of the current and future business impact of loss or theft.

EMC Consulting recommends that you devote resources to protect your most valued business data first. Determine the right mix of people, processes, and technology to meet your protection objectives. Define service levels for information security, operational availability, and recovery as well as business continuity. Then map applications into tiers of protection service levels to ensure a cost-effective strategy that can grow and change with your business.

Dynamic data center infrastructures generate business value by responding quickly to business growth and change. Leading IT organizations follow a set of best practices to achieve this, which includes linking their service-level agreements to the business, dynamically managing IT resources from an enterprise-wide pool, and automating data center management.

For many organizations, the challenge isn’t understanding the benefits of such a dynamic data center infrastructure, but developing a strategy and a plan achieving it while keeping current operations running. You know the destination; you need to understand where you are on the journey and you need a roadmap for getting there.

EMC recommends that you look at the maturity of your organization and data center operations. Do you have manual, localized processes with limited policies? Have you standardized and centrally managed your infrastructure, but still have reactive IT operations? Or are you proactively managing processes, policies and provisioning, but still automating operations?

Answering these kinds of questions helps to determine your level of maturity. EMC suggests evaluating several areas: customer and service, organization and process, infrastructure and toolset, people and skills, and benefits realization. Then you can determine the priorities for improving these areas based on what will deliver the greatest benefits to the business.