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4 Data Center & Hybrid Cloud Security For Dummies, Palo Alto Networks Special Edition These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. The 2019 "RightScale State of the Cloud Report" from Flexera found that public cloud adoption among organizations has grown to 91 percent and companies now run a majority of their work- loads in the cloud (38 percent of their workloads run in pub- lic cloud and 41 percent run in private cloud). Companies are also using SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings from multiple cloud providers — nearly five clouds on average. As cloud computing continues to play an integral role in digital transformation, the enterprise data center must evolve to support new technologies and business initiatives. Virtualization enables organizations to utilize data center infra- structure more effectively, which helps lower costs and improves operational efficiencies through automation, agility, and reus- ability of compute and network resources. Virtualization ini- tiatives often begin with server consolidation projects to more effectively utilize server hardware resources. These efforts often expand beyond host virtualization to include virtualization of storage, networking, and other physical infrastructure, in order to realize other virtualization benefits. In this way, enterprises are increasingly able to run their data center operations more efficiently — effectively transforming their data centers. Few organizations today can afford to ignore public cloud offer- ings, and rarely do an organization's physical data centers go away altogether, because it's neither feasible nor desirable to adopt a cloud strategy based solely on the public cloud. Instead, many organizations are adopting a hybrid cloud model to leverage the advantages of both public and private multi-cloud computing. The main driver for moving to a hybrid cloud strategy is busi- ness operations. Such a strategy enables IT organizations to bet- ter support constantly and rapidly changing business conditions and new opportunities, by being more flexible and agile. Other business benefits include the following: » Supports legacy applications: Some organizational applications may be legacy in nature and therefore do not lend themselves to either a lift-and-shift or refactoring of the workloads for use in the public cloud, thereby permanently relegating them to the on-premises data center.