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Executive Summary From Inhibitor to Digital Transformation Enabler With cloud adoption at 96%, 81% of enterprises working with a multi-cloud strategy, and organizations using, on average, five different clouds (CIO.com), it's clear that we live in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. The industry-wide demand for continuous innovation, the maturing of digital transformation initiatives, and the emergence of DevOps as the de facto development methodology for enterprises of all sizes, have brought us to this point. On the one hand, these trends have resulted in remarkable and rapid advances in technology. On the other hand, they have introduced monumental levels of complexity into the practice of IT infrastructure management. This complexity is multi-faceted. It involves the management of multiple on-premises, private and public cloud resources, complicated and lengthy provisioning processes for resource deployment, continually evolving challenges maintaining visibility into this ecosystem, as well as perennial concerns around governance, cost control, and security. In the face of this complexity, enterprise IT is feeling the heat. Charged both with consistently enabling innovation and digital transformation, while simultaneously maintaining visibility, ensuring security and compliance, and through it all keeping cloud spend under control, the pressure on IT leaders is unrelenting and immense. Unfortunately, IT leaders are falling short, at least from the perspective of the rest of the C-suite. Although IT budgets are on the rise, with nearly three in five IT organizations expecting budget increases in 2019 and beyond, most executives view IT as a drag on–not a driver of–innovation. To put it rather starkly: a mere 6% consider IT a competitive differentiator and a full quarter of executives actually see IT as a business inhibitor (Source: ESG 2019 Technology Spending Intention Survey). To be fair, IT's heart is in the right place. Cloud access does need to be controlled. Security and compliance must be maintained. Costs need to be managed. The challenge lies in adopting an approach to infrastructure management that facilitates innovation and improves organizational performance while maintaining comprehensive visibility and control over enterprise resources. In this brief, we will outline an approach that allows IT leaders to become strategic business drivers. This approach meets users where they are, employing a customer-centric model for IT in which the needs of the IT end-user drive IT operations. To that end, this approach emphasizes a self-service model for provisioning resources--a model that builds in guardrails and controls so that DevOps teams get what they need when they need it without exposing the organization to avoidable risk, either on the security or financial front. We will explore the principles and primary considerations behind this approach below, but our core belief is this: To tame the complexity inherent in today's enterprise IT infrastructure, IT leaders must adopt a flexible and extensible model for IT infrastructure management that relieves pressure on the IT organization while freeing the enterprise to take full advantage of emerging technologies and the latest development methodologies. 2 W H I T E P A P E R

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