he weight of the enterprise rests on IT, and complexity is spiraling out of control. IT manages an increasing number of geographically distributed applications and infrastructure with so many moving parts that something nearly always is broken or degraded. The widespread adoption of new technologies, such as server virtualization, network attached storage, and cloud computing, provide greater flexibility and perhaps even cost savings, but new layers of management and complexity are added as…

Virtualization technologies represent an enormous growth area in the enterprise data center. Yet existing management tools are inadequate to manage the new virtualized environment. Businesses are extremely hesitant to fully migrate to virtualized environments without comprehensive and real-time visibility into the entire infrastructure (servers, network, storage and end-user devices), as they absolutely need to maintain the same application performance and availability in a virtualized…

Many of you probably heard about Stuxnet, the malware that infected monitoring and control system PLCs in the Iranian nuclear program. The Stuxnet worm was able to damage centrifuges used to purify uranium at a highly secure facility in Iran. The result of the infection and infrastructure damage was that the Iranian’s quest for nuclear weapons suffered a serious setback.

The idea that a computer worm could cause damage to physical infrastructure was almost completely unprecedented. The…