Building and maintaining today's enterprise computing platforms is a lot more challenging than it was in the past. The competitive and fast moving nature of business requires a corporate network capable of meeting a company's ever changing needs and requirements. Today's business climate is driven by many forces which are constantly disrupting traditional IT culture.

The digital transformation movement is aiding in disruption. All companies want to share data and information with their clients and employees in a useful and meaningful way. Many companies are leveraging social media, mobile solutions, Big Data analytics and collaboration systems — often called the SMAC stack — to undergo this transformation. These technologies all require an agile and scalable IT platform. Additionally, shadow IT is constantly pushing IT to provide solutions with the threat of going around IT if they do not act swiftly.

For IT, these drivers pose difficult challenges as it is now commonplace for a fast moving business to throw out so many requests that they leave IT in their wake — unless the in-house IT pros can strategize and construct a computing platform built for growth and flexibility. In this slideshow, RKON has identified five factors organizations need to focus on when building high-growth IT.