Virtualization is a hot topic these days and for good reason.

Some people estimate that as much as 25% of the Internet runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is virtual infrastructure, virtual servers running in Amazon data centers that you can start and stop with the push of a button. You can move them around, back them up, scale them up, scale them down, do whatever you want with them, all without setting up a single piece of hardware. Amazon effectively pioneered the idea of virtualization when they created AWS. There were some smaller hosting companies offering virtual servers at the time, but Amazon brought the idea into the mainstream by offering them on a pay-per-use basis. Everyone else in the industry wouldn't even go near it for years. As it turns out, it was an awesome idea and now all the other big tech companies have joined the race; Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Oracle to name a few. In the industry this pay-per-use virtual infrastructure is called a public cloud. 

Virtualization is a big area of discussion and there are many cases where it makes sense to run a virtual server instead of a physical one. For instance, you may have a service that you need to be able to scale up quickly and you want to be able to test the market without investing tens of thousands of dollars in hardware. More recently, application developers are creating apps that are designed to run on virtual servers, such as wireless controllers, patch management systems, and mobile device managers. These are apps that you can also run on physical servers in your hardware closet, but running them in a public cloud sometimes makes more sense. This is because public clouds have made it so easy to manage a simple server that it can be much more affordable to run them online than it is to run them in your closet.

With that said, virtual infrastructure is not the best solution for all of your technical needs. There are many things worth considering before you launch into virtualizing your entire network infrastructure. We can help you run the cost benefit of virtualization and decide when and where it is a boon for your business.