The advantages of virtualisation for business: Three points to consider

We’re often asked about the advantages of virtualisation by our clients. But what does virtualisation actually mean?

Virtualisation is about reducing a business’ reliance on physical servers and seeking greater efficiency in IT operations.

For some, the term virtualisation causes confusion and is often mistaken as another way of describing cloud computing.

Virtualisation is a technology enabling the creation of ‘virtual machines’ to simulate hardware in the form of software.

Cloud computing is the broader service based on this virtualisation – it is possible to have virtualisation without the cloud, but not vice versa.

This misunderstanding can cause scepticism, which is preventing some companies from considering whether virtualisation could be the right IT strategy for them.

Here are three examples of the advantages of virtualisation to keep in mind when deciding if it could be right for you:

1. Improved efficiency

One of the advantages of virtualisation is that it decreases the space required in the data centre, ultimately resulting in lower operating costs.

This is because virtualisation negates the need to have a high number of physical servers. In turn, this reduces the cooling costs and also provides green benefits because of the lower overall energy usage.

Another of the advantages of virtualisation is that it offers a more efficient way of achieving flexible scalability. It is much quicker to have a new virtual server operational than to manually set up a new physical one.

It is also easier to spread automated management tasks across the virtual servers – this streamlining also saves a significant amount of time.

2. Disaster recovery benefits

An unexpected incident causing the servers to go down can be much easier to recover from with virtualisation. It is simple to move virtual machines from one server to another, even if the data centre itself has been affected.

Virtualisation platforms also have software which helps to automate the failover mode in the event of a disaster.

Moreover, this software offers a way of testing the failover operations in advance, making it easier to determine how well prepared a disaster recovery plan actually is.

3. Preparation for the cloud

Estimates suggest that 78% of small businesses will fully embrace cloud computing by 2020 and one of the best ways to prepare for this shift is to virtualise servers.

There are numerous advantages to cloud computing, such as scalable bandwidth, increased security, sharable documents, remote working and guaranteed backups.

Once you are ready to move your work from a data centre to the cloud, having virtualised servers will make the transition much simpler and quicker.

These are some of the advantages of virtualisation, but there are many others which may be relevant to your business – to find out more, please contact our team today.