A successful and scalable cloud-ready data center network must do four things:

 Simplify.  By reducing as much network complexities and virtualizing.

 Share.     Cloud-ready data centers requires an increase in network resources to be allocated, expanded, and re-allocated efficiently.  Allowing for this natural progression, means less hardware more sharing.

 Secure.   To enhance your overall simplification strategy, security services can also should be consolidated and virtualized. This approach enhances the flexibility and efficiency for the entire data center security solution. Data center security services such as application-aware denial of service, firewall, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and VPN can consolidated on a security platform to provide the flexibility and efficiency required to dynamically assign resources to the services.  By adhering to industry standards you can minimize risk and speed time to implementation when configuring security solutions for the cloud-ready data center.                                                                                                  

Automate. By standardizing on platforms and even more importantly operating systems, you can automate most management tasks and processes across the network.  Many solutions are offered as point products and don’t work efficiently together thus creating more work.  Your strategy should also involve reducing management complexities.