As budgets get tighter, organisations are looking for solutions to handle the burden of a geographically dispersed workforce. IT consolidation is the number one approach today, taking infrastructure out of remote offices and into the main data centre as a way to cut costs and boost IT staff productivity. The trick is how to consolidate without hurting the performance for the end users. Virtualisation is seen as a fundamental enabling technology for consolidation, allowing each server to be much more efficiently utilised and giving more flexibility to the infrastructure.

This paper lays out 5 steps to successful IT consolidation and virtualisation projects.