What keeps your IT staff from being able to deliver innovative and strategic new applications and services quickly? It’s probably not a lack of skills, resources, or determination. The root of the problem is often complexity.

As complexity increases, we see labor costs, downtime, training, and overhead all growing proportionally. Likewise, security becomes far more challenging and time consuming. The result is more staff spending more time on maintenance, with little time or budget remaining for delivering new services and applications rapidly.

No IT organization sets out to create complexity; it happens over time as legacy environments multiply and mutate into many different variations.

Considering the menagerie of infrastructure found within the average datacenter, it's amazing that the IT team has time for anything beyond keeping configurations, operating systems, and versions up-to-date and secure.

However, there is a way to tame the complexity: by standardizing the operating environment.