7 Ways to Prepare for the IT Infrastructure of the Future

As our feature article "The Future of IT Infrastructure" notes, for CIOs, it's the best of times and the worst of times.

On one hand, the opportunity to tap into technology and use it to achieve a competitive advantage has never been greater. (Witness the experiences of CIO Dale Potter at Ottawa Hospital and Wells Fargo & Company's Scott Dillon.) The new physics of IT offers a wormhole to a place -- and a performance level -- that couldn't have been imagined only a few years ago.

However, laggards increasingly find themselves staring into a black hole of Industrial-Age thinking and a hopelessly outdated network infrastructure. They can easily become shackled by inflexible systems that limit their ability to innovate.