Benefits of a Virtualized IT Environment (Part 1 of 3)
The benefits of virtualizing your IT environment are numerous, in this three part series of articles we take you through a few of the main points that highlight the benefits. From cost savings and management to growth and environmental factors, all of these are highlighted and are proven benefits of virtualizing your IT environment. Without the expertise and experience, setting up your virtualized environment can be complicated and if not done right can cause ongoing issues. If your company is planning on going down this path, System Architects’ dedicated team can assist with all aspects of the process from what you require to the ongoing management of your new IT environment.
Growth
One of the biggest issues small and midsize businesses encounter is growth. Growing your business is complicated, time consuming and expensive. Having the right policies and procedures in place can eliminate some of the hurdles but there are underlying infrastructure issues you will encounter that can be costly. Small and midsize companies benefit from their flexibility, this flexibility becomes more difficult as your company grows. Virtualizing your environment not only helps to create some of your policies and procedures it can increase your company’s growth potential without losing the flexibility and cost effectiveness. Being able to deploy quickly and expand and contract as needed are key strategies in any growing business. Virtualizing allows you to leverage your infrastructure and allows any growth either by adding additional virtual servers as needed or in the event your physical environment can’t handle the growth going to a cloud is made a lot simpler in a virtualized environment.
Isolation
Isolating certain application can benefit the performance of your entire environment. Having your file server, exchange etc. running on bare metal can cause issues with your server’s performance. Isolating these and allocating the appropriate resources can increase performance not to mention if there is an issue with your file server like the infamous crypto locker it won’t affect the performance of your exchange server.
Multiple OS
Having the ability to run multiple versions and flavours of OS like Ubuntu or Windows Server, reduces the burden on your environment, not to mention the cost for licenses. With this type of configuration you can have multiple virtual servers running and if you are a fan of Linux OS, you can reduce your licensing costs.
Higher Availability
Virtualizing your IT Environment while not a fully high availability solution does provide some additional uptime that you would not normally have if your environment rests on the bare metal. Having reduced downtimes is always a goal when it comes to your business. You can calculate how much it costs your company when your IT environment is down. While you have longer uptimes this does not replace a business continuity plan.
.........Continued in our next post, coming soon Benefits of a Virtualized IT Environment – Management (Part 2 of 3)
