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6 Next-Generation Hyperconverged Infrastructure For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Optimizing costs No matter how far IT rises in stature in an organization, you'll find people who want to use it to drive costs out of the organiza- tion. Or, more properly, they want to leverage technology to opti- mize cost structures. Of course, cost optimization is an enterprise-wide effort that includes optimizing IT costs. Thus, as IT is being asked to provide assistance to other business units to help them optimize expense items, IT is being forced to look inwardly at how it operates to ensure that it's as efficient as possible. We use the word optimize intentionally. Organizations that only seek to slash costs without consideration for the impact — including IT-related costs — are not going to find themselves on a positive trajectory. As the saying goes, "You can't cut your way to prosperity." Still, you can be smart about how you're spending. Addressing constantly emerging security concerns Myriad market themes have conglomerated into where the indus- try finds itself today. Thanks to proliferation of data, devices, clouds, Internet users, and more, security has become a board- room issue. News stories hit the wire every week with lurid details regarding the latest data breach that has left millions of records exposed or about a malware attack that has crippled a city gov- ernment or even a hospital. The security issue isn't going away . . . ever. As organizations seek to further integrate their business and technologies, the value of business and customer data grows, and the complexity of IT inherently increases risk, the issue of security becomes even more important. Moreover, enterprise IT's scope of responsibility con- tinues to have its lines blurred. Not long ago, IT only had to keep hackers out of the four walls of the on-premises datacenter. With the rise of the public and private cloud, those lines blurred. Today, enterprises must secure a new perimeter around these public and private clouds, as well as hybrid cloud environments that leverage two or more separate cloud resources — for example, two differ- ent private clouds (perhaps an on-premises private cloud and a hosted private cloud), two different public clouds — for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure — or a public and private cloud.