The emergence of the individual consumer as the primary driver of product and service design is most commonly associated with the IT industry, as large business and government organizations dominated the early decades of computer usage and development.
In a different sense, consumerization of IT is the proliferation of personally owned IT at the workplace (in addition to, or even instead of, company-owned IT), which originates in the consumer market, to be used for professional purposes.
In particular the rise of free, advertising-based services such as email and search from companies such as Hotmail and Yahoo began to establish the idea that consumer IT offerings based on a simple Internet browser were often viable alternatives to traditional business computing approaches.
[5] The primary impact of consumerization is that it is forcing businesses, especially large enterprises, to rethink the way they procure and manage IT equipment and services.
Historically, central IT organizations controlled the great majority of IT usage within their firms, choosing or at least approving of the systems and services that employees used.
Equally important, large enterprises have become increasingly dependent upon consumerized services as search, mapping, and social media.
One of the most important consumerization questions going forward is to what extent such advertising-based services will spread into major corporate applications such as email, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Intranets.
Supporting these consumer-driven volumes requires new levels of efficiency and scale, and this is transforming many traditional data center approaches and practices.
Among the major changes are reliance on low cost, commodity servers, N+1 system redundancy, and largely unmanned data center operations.