The Role of Virtualization in Your Business
Virtualization has taken the business environment to the next level. While this technology was accessible only to large corporations before, it is now widely used by small and medium businesses.
Commonly offered by IT services in Ellicott City, virtualization is the process of creating a digital version of hardware such as a server, storage device, network, or operating system. Using a software layer (called hypervisor), it is able to separate the operating system and applications from its hardware to create independent virtual machines. This allows them to interact independently while still sharing the original resources from the physical device.
Virtualization creates flexibility for the computer hardware and software. It presents functionalities that would otherwise be impossible within a physical infrastructure. Businesses that are using virtualization technology can experience dramatic benefits in return. To find out how adoption of a virtualized environment can benefit your organization, read on.
Cost savings on IT hardware
As you will be converting multiple physical machines into virtual ones, you will only need a few bare metal devices to host them. This will trim down your requirement of procuring several hardware resources, enabling you to centralize your operational environment. Aside from that, you will also get significant savings for buying only a few physical devices.
Reducing the number of your physical machines has a significant effect on data center savings. It can reduce hardware and operating expenses by as much as 50 percent. And by utilizing virtualization correctly, you can easily minimize the work of 20 servers down to a single or a few servers.
Moreover, asking IT services in Ellicott City to virtualize your resources will allow you to operate in a smaller space and hire fewer staff. It also lets the company use older IT hardware devices for a longer period of time.
Reduced power costs
Bigger companies tend to spend more for its energy costs as they use larger IT infrastructure. Also, physical machines such as servers, desktops, and storage units consume a lot of power supply to function. With virtualization, you can save on power expenses since you will only be using less amount of IT hardware.
Bare metal machines like servers and computers need good cooling just to keep everything at optimal temperatures. Dropping the number of machines by half or more can reduce your energy bills and encourage the business to be environment-friendly. In fact, a study shows that virtualization enables a company to save up to 77% of power costs.
Remember - utility costs never decrease, so cutbacks in power and cooling requirements are definitely a big help for small and mid-sized businesses.
Easy maintenance
Transitioning to virtual resources could mean less money spent on labor and maintenance. Reducing the number of physical servers leads to decreased hardware maintenance costs. It also puts away some burden on the IT team, as they will have fewer physical servers to provision, monitor, and maintain manually.
Running a virtualized environment on just one physical machine makes the management process simpler and easier. Upgrades and patches will be deployed faster, and businesses will be in tune with the latest IT updates easily, mitigating downtime. It would also lessen the human resources needed to handle the machine, creating a more streamlined and efficient IT process in a consolidated virtual environment.
Better reliability and security
Security breach is something that many businesses consider when deploying an IT infrastructure. Although securing a company's systems and networks can be an immense challenge, it can be made possible through virtualization. Virtualization can improve the overall security of your resources as IT personnel have less number of machines and a small infrastructure to monitor and handle. In addition, using virtual solutions makes security more precise, easier to manage, and less costly to deploy than traditional physical security.
There's also a slimmer chance that infection will spread to the rest of your IT infrastructure as virtualization can isolate machines and networks from each other. This decreases the likelihood of security issues in your IT environment, ultimately saving security costs in the long run.
Final Thoughts
In this technology-driven world we have, workloads continue to pile up while budgets seem to dwindle. Having a virtualized environment can help you create a more flexible and efficient IT process without having to spend a lot of money.
Swift Systems is an IT service provider in Ellicott City that helps customers achieve business effectiveness through unified and virtualized IT infrastructure. From the installation to the management process, we ensure to provide a solution that fits your needs. Contact us today for more details.