The combination of cloud computing, big data analytics, mobility and social media is defining a new compute era that will dominate IT spending growth in the coming years. IT teams are being pressed to build agile data centers that can handle the necessary speed, agility, storage capacity and bandwidth demands of today’s applications and business requirements. In looking at new data center initiatives such as the software-defined data centers, IT must understand what it takes to move forward without subjecting the organization to increased risk of downtime, data breaches, unavailability of applications or loss of data.