12-27-21 | Blog Post
Gartner reports that global spending on cloud IT infrastructure is expected to reach $104 billion by 2024. This comes as more and more organizations leverage the benefits of the cloud including optimized IT costs, increased security, and reliability. In fact, over the last decade, many businesses have moved from physical on-site data centers to virtualized data center solutions as server virtualization has become an industry-standard practice.
A virtualized data center is a logical software abstraction of a physical data center that provides a collection of cloud infrastructure components including servers, storage clusters, and other networking components, to business enterprises. Virtual data centers can be customized to provide cloud computing resources including processor power, memory, storage, and bandwidth tailored to a business’s unique needs.
Datacenter virtualization offers a variety of strategic and technology benefits to businesses ranging from increased profitability to greater scalability. Here we’ll discuss 7 of these benefits.
On-site data center solutions require vast upfront and continuing financial investment in building and maintaining the facility, training employees, hardware acquisition, and overhead costs. With a virtualized data center solution, the virtualized IT components are hosted in physical data centers owned and operated by the cloud service provider. This removes the financial burden from the business owner, allowing you to keep more of your profits.
As with other cloud-based solutions, virtualized data center services are offered as pay-as-you-go subscriptions, allowing companies to add resources and pay for them as needed. With this payment model, you can more accurately predict your operational expenses to budget your financial resources more effectively.
A virtual data center solution allows businesses to benefit from the enterprise-grade security and compliance features native to the cloud environment.
Because virtual machines (VMs) are always separated from the underlying hardware infrastructure, data traffic within the virtual ecosystem remains encapsulated and secure, assuring you that critical business data and applications remain protected.
For companies that require a higher standard of security due to regulatory requirements, a virtual data center simplifies data governance and policy maintenance making it easier to maintain a high level of compliance. Centralized management tools allow IT support teams to set up, maintain and replicate compliance policies as needed.
In the past, provisioning a new server could take weeks, sometimes even months. And onboarding a new employee could take hours. In each case, the new hardware had to be purchased, shipped, and received, and then hours spent installing operating systems and server or job-specific software.
With data center virtualization, IT administrators can set up virtual servers and desktops in minutes from a pre-configured image or master template or by cloning an existing virtual machine.
Virtualized data center technologies allow businesses to procure additional IT resources in minutes in response to changing business needs or new opportunities.
Loss of productivity can have a direct effect on a business’s profitability. Datacenter virtualization can increase the productivity levels of IT administrators and other employees. Because data center services are outsourced, the responsibility for the maintenance and management of the physical data center lies with the cloud service provider.
Instead of troubleshooting servers and other network components, IT administrators only need to manage and monitor the virtual components of the data center. This is easily done through centralized tools and interfaces that allow them to support the entire virtual ecosystem remotely and in real-time.
Virtualized data center services can also support your business’s disaster recovery plan with features like server fail-over, load balancing, and backup and recovery functionality. An interrupting event like a cyberattack or natural disaster can cause little to no downtime if recovery is as simple as migrating your virtual machines to another virtual server instance. This means your employees can continue business operations with minimal inconvenience to customers.
As more organizations migrate to a remote workforce, employees must be able to access business files, applications, and services that may be spread across corporate offices. Data mobility is becoming more and more essential. The inability to access information as needed could mean lost sales, delayed product development, and even unsatisfied customers.
With a virtual data center, your employees can access business data when and where they need it while you ensure that security and compliance policies are enforced. In this way, your business can support remote employees as they mobilize business targets while still retaining centralized visibility and control over corporate information.
A virtual data center provides businesses with a flexible infrastructure that allows them to respond rapidly to new market opportunities and changing customer demands.
During peak times, onboarding temporary employees is a quick and easy process, especially if you have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. You can install a virtual desktop on a personal end-point device in minutes. Your data stays secure while you avoid the cost of purchasing an additional machine.
If a product or service suddenly becomes popular, increasing pressure on network and server resources, operations teams can deploy more processing power, memory, or storage as needed.
A virtual data center gives you the flexibility to increase IT resources and pivot business operations in response to market demand to gain a competitive edge.
Cloud-based computing environments are designed for scalability. Any company experiencing high levels of growth should consider implementing a virtualized data center. A virtual data center maximizes a business’s ability to scale to meet the increased resource demands of a growing business with the just-in-time allocation of bandwidth, storage capacity, and other IT resources.
It’s also a good fit for companies that experience seasonal increases in business activity. During peak times, virtualized memory, processing power, and storage can be added at a lesser cost and in a faster timeframe than purchasing and installing components on a physical machine. Then, when demand slows, virtual resources can be scaled down, removing unnecessary expenses.
Virtualized data centers offer several advantages to businesses of all sizes, including predictable costs, increased productivity, and enterprise-level security. Otava offers a broad range of cost-effective Virtual Private Data Center solutions that are scalable, reliable, and secure.
Contact us today for more information about how we can help you migrate to a virtual data center solution.
