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12: The Future of Green IT for Corporations 213

■ Business alignment: A highly efficient and shared infrastructure can
enable you to respond instantaneously to new business needs. It creates
opportunities to make sound decisions based on information obtained in
real time, and it provides the tools you need to free up resources from
more traditional operational demands. With a new enterprise data center,
you can focus on delivering IT as a set of services aligned to the business,
freeing up time to spend on IT-driven business innovation.

What makes this approach for efficient IT service delivery unique? As
businesses move toward a recentralization of the data center environment, a
holistic integrated approach needs to be considered. We need to capture an
end-to-end view of the IT data center and its key components. Although we
understand that incremental improvements to each element of the new enter-
prise data center can improve overall operations, we take into account that
modifications to one component might strain the performance of another.
For example, upgrading the enterprise information architecture to provide
integrated and trusted information to users will likely require changes to
security and business resiliency approaches. And creating highly virtualized
ptg
resources are most effective along with a stronger, more integrated service
management approach. As such, the strategy for the new enterprise data cen-
ter needs to be holistic and integrate the following key elements:

■ Highly virtualized resources that are flexible to adjust to changing
business needs to allow for more responsive provisioning and help deliver
efficient resource utilization. Virtualization removes the bind between
applications and data and underlying physical resources-granting IT
organizations more flexibility and freedom in deployment options and
the ability to exploit highly optimized systems.
■ Business-driven service management, in which a complex and diffi-
cult-to-manage environment is transformed for improved transparency
and cost-efficient, easier management. This transformation involves rais-
ing management tasks from the simple monitoring of individual
resources to the orchestration of the entire environment to be more
responsive and efficient. When transformed, the environment can be fully
aligned with business needs and controls to ensure that customer priori-
ties are met, business controls are maintained, and availability and per-
formance is maximized across the entire enterprise.