Nigerian firms urged to increase virtualisation deployments

Ben Uzor Jr
In the face of the worst economic depression of our generation, an Information Technology (IT) expert has advised Nigerian enterprises to adopt virtualisation solutions as they could tremendously improve an organisations ability to respond to new business challenges by providing the foundation for a more dynamic IT environment.
Virtualisation refers to the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, storage device or network resources. It allows enterprises run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Chrystabel Davis, vice president, DBH Solution Limited, a indigenous IT solutions and services provider made this revelation while speaking to Business Day in Lagos recently.
According to her, the number of transactions and volume of information puts huge demands on IT infrastructure. To this effect, decision makers are seeking flexible IT infrastructure that can keep pace with demands and improve their business agility. But more importantly, by lowering organisations total cost of ownership (TCO) which includes cost associated with hardware purchases, maintenance and facilities, the novel technology concept can free up budgets for new initiatives, Davis explained.
In citing a recent IDC survey, she noted that customers that have deployed virtualisation were able to reduce their hardware costs by 20 percent. This reduction, Davis further revealed resulted in a savings of, on average, 23 percent over the past 12 months due to lower hardware costs, power and cooling savings, and real estate expense savings.
“Virtualisation is not a simple technology to deploy throughout an enterprise data centre but if implemented properly it can have spectacular results and reduce IT costs and improve flexibility. It can also enable organisation to simplify and optimise their infrastructure. This would assist business respond to new IT demands in a cost effective way while improving service and managing risk.
On the contrary, industry experts have advised enterprises to improve virtualisation deployment methods. In a recent report, Gartner warned that two-thirds of virtual servers will be less secure than physical equivalents over the next three years. The research company said that too many virtualised deployment projects are been undertaken without adequate involvement of security experts in the initial architecture and planning stages.
Gartner further reveals that the figure will drop to 30 per cent by the end of 2015, but urged businesses to take additional precautions when implementing the technology. With more firms set to adopt on-demand technology over the next few years, the need to address the security issues associated with virtualisation will become more critical to address, the company added.