Digital and IT transformation demand that enterprises modernize their compute infrastructure to achieve unprecedented levels of performance, flexibility, scale, and intelligence.

This requires a portfolio of systems—scale up or out, rack or blade servers, converged, hyperconverged and software-defined storage infrastructures—all based on a common, programmable foundation. Infrastructure resources must be easy to secure and provision, while supporting modern automation, orchestration, management and analytics tools.

The digital experience is now the gateway to your customers and the standard bearer of your company’s brand. But as apps become more distributed, more intelligent and more real-time, gaining visibility into the underlying infrastructure has become more complex. Traditional monitoring solutions that cannot correlate application topologies to business transactions and map critical customer pathways leave organizations blind to the changes needed in the underlying infrastructure that will assure performance, security and scalability of their apps.

Gone are the days when applications and infrastructure were located only at the data center. Today’s digital demands require the ability to run across many clouds and a smarter, more powerful edge. Every cloud and every edge infrastructure must be able to run any application securely and with predictable performance.

Today’s edge must also be powerful enough to run today’s modern, compute-intensive applications and perform near-real-time analytics on your most valuable resource: your data. Edge analytics are transforming possibilities in retail, factories, healthcare, cities and more.

A more distributed, data center-to-multicloud-to-edge infrastructure creates more vulnerabilities and entry points for today’s stealthy cyberthreats.

Strong perimeter security at your data center is no longer enough. Comprehensive security requires a multi-layered strategy, including network segmentation, intelligent threat detection and prevention, faster response capabilities and more. A modern security strategy requires an infrastructure that isn’t simply an exposure point to threats, but is instead a proactive defense system that protects against threats.

How do you manage an infrastructure that’s distributed everywhere—residing on-prem, within multiple clouds and across a broad expanse of edge locations?

You need flexible management tools that provide visibility and insight, and that can quickly take action on a global scale. The infrastructure must not only enable you to monitor what’s happening, it must proactively alert, troubleshoot, advise and help resolve problems before they impact your business.