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Can Virtualization pass the litmus test to gain acceptance among corporates?
By Aadil Masood, SiliconIndia
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Monday, 08 November 2010, 23:20 IST
Bangalore:Virtualization - V word seems to be a hot bed of debates and deliberations in the Indian IT sector.Keeping pace with the evolution and adapting to the changes are the key parameters for IT field to be in fray and maintain its leadership. Virtualization is considered as necessary technique for addressing the challenges and complexities of managing a growing IT infrastructure.
Although, the number of organizations that have adopted virtualization to address some key business and IT challenges is small when compared to the size of the India's business. Studies have shown that each year Indian IT departments spend more than 70 per cent of their budgets to maintain existing systems, leaving only 30 percent to spend on new capabilities that add business value. The key challenge for IT is to be able to strike the right balance between managing the organization's existing infrastructure and adding business value. And, at the moment virtualization may provide remedy to this chronic disease.
Enterprises are becoming aware of virtualization and the value proposition it brings. It is easy to think that all new technology is bad for the environment - but Virtualization is different. It holds the potential to massively slash green house emissions whilst saving money and making computing more convenient. Virtualization can help organization achieve significant reduction in hardware costs and energy demands. Virtualization can greatly enhance an organization's business agility.
Companies that employ clustering, partitioning, workload management and other virtualization techniques to configure groups of servers into reusable pools of resources are better positioned to respond to the changing demands their business places on those resources. Of late,Cisco has introduced Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (Cisco VXI) in India which enables organizations to free employees to work remotely, cutting real estate and energy costs.Cisco, Vice President, ITS sales, Jagdish Mahapatra said," the IT sector has evolved over the last couple of years,especially as the recession forced companies to trim costs and improve efficiencies to remain competitive".
Virtualization may become dominant in enterprises, but the security apprehensions are there. There have been many concerns over the years about security within a virtual environment. Many incorrectly believe that just because the environment is virtual, the environment itself must inherently be secure. Virtual environments for the most part suffer from the same security concerns as does the physical environment.
Security threats can originate externally and internally in a virtualized environment. The 'intra-host threats' can elude any existing security protection schemes. Since the virtualized security threats are hard to pin down. This can result in the spread of computer viruses, theft of data, and denial of service, regulatory compliance conflicts, or other consequences within the virtualized environment.
Companies appreciate the benefits that virtualization software can deliver and their apprehension to commit their most vital data runs to a technology that's still viewed as a work in progress.