Forrester

Why Read This Report

Why are most organizations not achieving more with infrastructure virtualization? They just aren't ready to. Through more than 200 enterprise interviews, correlated with survey data, Forrester has identified four clear stages of infrastructure virtualization maturity that dictate readiness for various management and automation technologies, process improvements that must be made, and standardizations that have to be realized to achieve greater gains. Organizations progress from gaining acclimation with the technology, to strategically standardizing on it, through a period of chaotic VM sprawl that leads to process improvements, on to the point of pooling and policy-based automation. This last phase is akin to the processes followed by providers of cloud computing platforms. These improvements can't be fast tracked — enterprises must go through each stage as they gain experience. But once you identify your stage of maturity there are clear steps you can take to move to the next stage.