5 Virtualization Trends Every CIO Should Know About

Technology is evolving faster than ever before, and virtualization is no exception. But it wasn’t that long ago that organizations were running applications right on their physical servers. Remember server rooms—cool and humming with the lull of business as usual?

Now, virtualization is one of the most widely employed computing technologies. In fact, 75% of organizations use virtual servers.

Thanks to improved scalability, high availability options, application isolation and more, virtualization adoption has thrived. And it’s unrecognizable from the first commercially available virtual technologies that IBM launched back in 1972. The move forward is unmistakable—empowering organizations to achieve more while leaving most of the hardware behind.

So, what’s next? This blog explores the future of virtualization and next steps organizations can take to prepare. Here’s what’s coming:

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According to the 2020 State of Virtualization Technology, virtualization adoption is growing beyond servers. In fact, by 2021, virtualization in desktops, applications, network, storage and data virtualization is expected to experience powerful double-digit growth. That’s a significant surge while more organizations continue to move away from dated and unnecessary hardware towards virtualization and the cloud.

2. Security is getting more complicated.

Why? Because virtual machines and servers are more secure than other physical technologies in certain aspects and more dangerous in others. The expansive interconnectedness of virtual environments can mean a broader surface to come under attack. Cybercriminals can launch an attack on a complete network by infecting just one machine. Only the most skilled hackers can penetrate a virtual environment, but it isn’t impossible.

Arming your organization with security solutions and education is the answer.

3. Everything is moving to the cloud.

And virtualization is no exception. In fact, according to the 2020 State of Virtualization Technology, 45% of organizations are actively assessing or already planning moving their entire server virtualization environment to the cloud.

VMWare and others are actively highlighting the deep organizational benefits of cloud and hybrid cloud environments—streamlining working environments, speeding up collaboration and boosting security.

In fact, to guide more organizations to an infrastructure-up strategy with their existing vSphere-based SDDCs, VMWare released VMWare Foundations. The service allows organizations to migrate portions or the entirety of their on-premise SDDC to the public cloud while enjoying control and the recognizable features of the environment.

4. More than half of organizations will use storage virtualization and application virtualization.

According to Spiceworks, more than half of organizations across the enterprise plan to use storage virtualization and application virtualization by 2021. Application virtualization is predicted to jump from 39% now to 56% by then. Double-digit growth is also expected in the use of desktop, data and network virtualization by 2021.

5. There will be no shortage of performance issues.

Let’s face it, virtual machines can perform on par with physical machines when set up correctly. But when organizations don’t have the internal resources to adequately plan, configure and deploy their virtual environments, performance issues are just around the corner.

Different strategies like testing which VMS are using the most CPU resources can help. Throttling—using a hypervisor to control network bandwidth, CPU memory and disk bandwidth for each VM—can also help.

Sometimes though, nothing beats bringing in some outside experts to help you map out the perfect strategy for your organization while your team keeps their focus on innovation.