The move to the cloud represents the biggest sea change for IT in a generation. In the 2000s, virtualization allowed IT organizations to consolidate many workloads on the same physical hardware, thereby increasing utilization and efficiency. It also provided a critical stepping stone. Building on virtualization, cloud platforms provide the ability to run these virtualized workloads on rented infrastructure managed by the cloud provider, freeing IT from having to maintain physical data centers and the infrastructure that runs in them.
