The Time Has Come for SMB Virtualization
The past few years have been a period of rapid change for businesses around the world. The recent worldwide economic downturn has left organizations scrambling to get all they can out of their IT resources. Because of the potential for streamlining and reducing operational costs, many organizations have turned to virtualization, especially large enterprises. As the market has matured and vendors have continued to refine their technology, smaller businesses have also begun to take advantage of virtualization technology.
In May of 2011, Symantec conducted a survey of small businesses in order to discover how they perceive virtualization, and to what extent they are adopting it. The survey shows a substantial amount of interest in virtualization technology, but adoption is progressing slowly. In addition, many businesses are failing to adequately protect their data in a virtualized environment.
The Interest in Virtualization
The first significant finding of the survey is that the majority of small businesses are interested in virtualization, with a full 70 percent of them at least considering it. They cited a host of reasons for their interest. First was a desire to reduce capital and operational expenditures, followed by a desire to utilize fewer servers to maintain the same number of applications. Not only that, but they also hope to use virtualization to improve server scalability.
These goals make two things clear. First, there are a lot of potential benefits offered by virtualization. And second, IT departments need to make the most of their existing infrastructure. With budget and staffing shortages brought on in part by the recession, this should come as no surprise.
In addition to financial motivations there are more practical reasons for looking into virtualization. Businesses stand to improve their disaster recovery preparedness through employing technologies such as data deduplication. By employing tools that provide a mirror or critical systems without the need for additional hardware, organizations are able to keep their data safe in the event of an emergency while keeping costs to a minimum.
Adoption Is Still in the Early Stages
Despite the serious interest in virtualization, however, organizations are still in the early stages of implementation. While the majority of the businesses surveyed show interest in the technology, adoption rates are lagging behind. In fact, only 10 percent of them have deployed server virtualization, which is typically the first step in an overall virtualization plan. A further 43 percent are currently in discussion or conducting trials of the technology, and 17 percent are in the process of implementation. This shows that, although adoption has been sporadic to this point, it is poised to jump in the next few years.
The applications being virtualized by businesses indicate to what extent they have committed themselves to the technology. In this area too, small businesses are showing caution. Among those who have virtualized servers, the most commonly virtualized application groups are Web applications (with a virtualization rate of 49 percent) and database management (46 percent), followed by email and calendar applications (39 percent). While these are important applications for keeping a business running smoothly, they are not considered critical for operations. In contrast, less than one-third of organizations, however, plan to virtualize business-critical applications such as accounting, ERP and CRM.
