Why Should Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Virtualize in 2022?

When it comes to developing strategies for your business growth and success, it’s essential to consider the structure of your network so it’s scalable and secure. Server virtualization has been helping businesses gain unmatched control over their development for more than ten years. In the simplest terms, it’s a process where all the company’s information saved on physical backups is shifted to a virtual atmosphere. The importance of virtualizing is not limited to large organizations— it also serves small- and medium-sized businesses well. Moving to a virtualized environment provides small and medium sized businesses multiple advantages including:

Increased Flexibility. The process of virtualization is exceptionally flexible, especially for small businesses, as it allows the operators to modify the virtual machines without changing the hardware. The companies can shrink or expand the virtualized system while the data remains unaffected. Medium-sized businesses profit from virtualization by having a feasible schedule of deploying the IT resources and handling the data files.

Better Resource Deployment. Virtualizing your small- or medium-sized business can decrease your time deploying a new server to your system. For the manual deployment of resources such as enhanced servers, plenty of regulated steps need to be managed. For instance, server installation, resolution adjustments, security, optimization, and most importantly, setting up the software. All these steps require technical assistance and a fair amount of time. However, once you’ve migrated to a virtualized system, you can use the already arranged server templates to deploy a new server within minutes.

Enhanced Security. The physical security and the protection of data files in a small- or medium-sized business are critical to its survival. Virtualization offers a good enhancement in security by lowering the number of required hardware in a business environment. Virtualized systems automatically return to their original state if the system is compromised, thus providing a high level of security. There are several ways to enhance security in virtualization, such as implementing sandboxing and hypervisor as well as network, server, and desktop virtualization.

Higher Availability. With the pandemic in action, the number of employees working remotely is increasing steadily, which means they need easy access to servers more often. With virtualization of the business servers, there’s an automatic surge in the availability of resources to the employees. Employees can access the company resources anywhere and anytime, using whichever hardware device. Such a change is possible with virtualized systems. A study by McKinsey suggests that in 2021, nearly 25% of employees can easily do their jobs remotely for three or more days per week. With the changing global trends, virtualization is a must strategy for all small and medium businesses.

Strong Disaster Recovery . Virtualization saves small and evolving businesses from losing a lot of valuable data stored on their hard drives or computer servers. It offers a quick recovery from hardware server disasters and ensures disaster management for the future. When an unfortunate event occurs in a small organization, it can badly impact its future outcomes. Someone must fix the damages, and it can take a lot of time, energy, and resources. However, with server virtualization, disaster recovery is a lot easier, as replicating the virtual files can be done in minutes. A study by the University of Texas reveals that over 90% of the businesses that suffer from significant data loss cannot survive.

Reduced Energy Consumption. The energy consumption in a virtualized environment is significantly reduced because of the lower administration required for it. Similarly, the cost for hardware and their maintenance is reduced up to 50% as well. The virtualized servers eliminate the need to spend energy and capital on hardware, new server installation and physical upkeep. The electricity used for the hardware data centers and files is saved by this system, and the power cost is cut off too. Before the rise in virtualization, the price for power utilization was in the billions and increasing each year for the operation of data centers.

Cloud Preparation. Apart from all the obvious and direct advantages of virtualizing your business, you get a substantial indirect benefit, which is preparation for the cloud. With virtualization, plans for moving to the cloud can be achieved. The virtualization process removes the primary hardware servers, and from there, you can move your virtualized files to a private cloud. Once you move to a private cloud, it becomes easier to shift towards a cloud hosting facility. So, if you have taken a step to virtualize your developing business, it means you are prepared when moving to the cloud.

Virtualizing a small- and medium-sized business will not only save time, energy, money, and data but also help prepare the company for future cloud computing experiences. This is especially important for SMBs that cannot afford any complications in their developing phases.

Visual Edge specializes in managed IT services and security, cloud computing, and print/copy solutions for businesses across the U.S., including remote offices. The company has more than 30 years of technology service with a national network of expert engineers. Request your no-obligation assessment today and get a free dark web analysis.