Many enterprises are migrating workloads away from on-premises data center occupancy to a combined cloud and colocation deployment often termed “hybrid cloud.” This requires careful planning to insure efficient, reliable, and flexible platform adoptions supporting future IT goals.

Many enterprises have aging on-premises data centers with major critical systems nearing end of life, and some owners won’t approve the sizable capital investments required to change that. Users have also realized that small and mid-sized self-operated data centers (less than 2 MW) aren’t as economical or environmentally friendly as the 20- to 50-MW data centers being built at scale by large colocation and cloud providers.