For many small businesses in the United States, virtualization – the practice of digitizing items that formerly only existed in physical form such as hardware and storage space – makes significant fiscal sense.
While physical processes are oftentimes expensive and rigid to the point that they cannot be scaled in a way that upgrades or downsizes business requirements to meet specific goals, virtualization enables a small business to spend less on an upfront investment on a platform that can expand or decrease whenever necessary.
As such, according to managed service provider news source MSPMentor, nearly 40 percent of small businesses reported plans to have at least have of their servers running on a virtualization platform by the end of 2012.
Moreover, according to the Disaster Recovery Index – a measure based on a global survey of 6,000 IT professionals – virtualization is anticipated to rise by 21 percent for small businesses in 2012. Interestingly, Gartner Inc. suggested that only 14 percent of larger enterprises would do the same, indicating that small entities are flocking to virtualized servers with more enthusiasm.
However, although virtualization provides small businesses with many cost and efficiency benefits, it is just as important to have strategic data backup protocols for virtual servers as it is physical ones.
As such, it is interesting to note that the Disaster Recovery Index found that only just over 30 percent backup their virtual servers with the same frequency as physical servers and that just under 40 percent back them up on a daily basis.
In response, small business officials in Illinois who lack the internal resources to develop reasonable virtual backup protocols would be wise to partner with a Chicago IT consulting service such as CTI Technology that can provide virtualization solutions. By taking this measure, data will be more secure from a loss, generating a fast ROI based on diminished downtime should an emergency occur.
In response, small business officials in Illinois who lack the internal resources to develop reasonable virtual backup protocols would be wise to partner with a Chicago IT consulting service such as CTI Technology that can provide virtualization solutions.
