Across all industries, technology spending as a percentage of total revenue averages just over 3%.
That figure rises every year as businesses realize that the tech they invest in impacts growth, performance, and profits. And virtualization for business is one technology solution that helps in all of those departments.
But what exactly is it and what are the benefits of virtualization? It’s a simple switch in your IT that will bring you saving in terms of cost and space, among other things.
If you’re a business owner looking for ways to save money and increase growth potential, you need to to know about the advantages of virtualization. Keep reading to find out exactly what those are.
What is Virtualization for Business?
Virtualization allows you to perform core functions of your business in a virtualized environment. When your technology is virtualized, it means you can use resources that aren’t physically present around you. Instead, they exist in a virtual environment.
With this technology, the workloads of different servers aren’t tied to a specific piece of hardware. Conversely, one piece of physical hardware can facilitate multiple virtual workloads.
The most common types of virtualization include network, data, desktop, and storage virtualization. The most common and familiar type of virtualization for business is partitioning the server. This is called server virtualization, and it’s the tech that’s going to save you money, space, and redundancy.
What is Server Virtualization?
Server virtualization means partitioning your server to create one or more virtual servers. You can do this using virtualization software or with a managed IT service provider.
Switching to virtualization makes it so that one single device will host multiple servers. These virtual servers are, in essence, their own distinct and separate server.
All the virtual servers share the resources of the single device they’re created on. Because they’re virtualized, many users can share the same physical server at the same time. And they can do so while using different operating systems and performing very different tasks.
But the benefits of virtualization don’t stop there.
What Are the Benefits of Virtualization for Business?
First and foremost, server virtualization benefits include cost-savings. But there’s more to the benefits of virtualization than your bottom line. Below we discuss all of the potential advantages of virtualization in more detail.
Cost Savings
Buying and even renting a physical server to host your processes isn’t cheap. And there’s no way to only pay for the portion of the resources you’re using. Plus you might even be paying additional costs for cooling and powering the equipment as well as cabling.
All that to say that, if you’re a small or medium-sized business, paying for a dedicated server is costly. And you’re likely not using all the resources that an entire server provides. That means you’re wasting money.
But when you switch to virtualization, you can share business processes across one single physical server. It allows you to pay for what you use and nothing more. That means cost savings.
You’ll save money on physical hardware as well as software. For example, if you run different operating systems for different business processes, you need a piece of hardware for each of those systems. But in the virtual world, you can run multiple operating systems from one physical server.
You’ll also save money on energy. Because there are less physical devices, you consume far less energy than you would otherwise.
Reduce Physical Space
In a world where rents are rising quickly, office space is a hot commodity. You want to minimize the amount of space you use for things that don’t directly make you money. And by implementing virtualization for business, you’ll save a lot of physical space.
As we mentioned, one of the benefits of virtualization is that you don’t need as many physical pieces of hardware. That clears up a lot of space, depending on the amount of hardware you currently have.
This also means space saving for data centers and service providers. With the ability to host multiple virtual servers from one piece of equipment, you free up space for more physical hardware that can help you grow your business.
Ease of Duplication
If you use multiple operating systems and applications, you can host them all from a single device. We already talked about how this saves you on hardware costs and energy. But we haven’t talked about how this saves you time.
Virtualization for business saves you time in replicating the setup from one server to another. Within minutes, you can duplicate the systems and applications on one virtual server to another machine. That negates all the time (and money) you’d otherwise spend on installing a new physical server.
Reduce Downtime
The average cost of a service outage for any given enterprise is over $400,000 USD. Every minute of downtime costs you more and more money. But one of the server virtualization benefits is a significant reduction in downtime.
When you virtualize your server, upgrades, maintenance, and migrations can be done without shutting down the server. So your employees can continue to perform their regular tasks and roles while these necessary adjustments are made. All you have to do it move the virtual server to a new host, make the adjustment, and then put the virtual server back.
Not having as many physical servers to deal with also means that you have less physical maintenance to perform. If something goes wrong, the problem requires less physical servers to be checked and diagnosed.
Need Help Managing Your IT?
Virtualization for business can involve your network, data, desktop, and storage. But the most familiar form of virtualization for business is server virtualization. This involves partitioning your server into a number of virtual servers, all run from the same piece of physical hardware.
The benefits of virtualization include cost saving and reduced downtime. It saves you time and energy and allows your employees to focus on what actually makes the business money. If that sounds like the kind of business solution you’re looking for, check out our pricing guide to get started.
