As a CIO, it’s your responsibility to chart the technological course for your organization and to do so in a way that meets business needs while fitting inside a budget. Virtualization is one of the most significant advancements to hit the enterprise, and it can be a tremendous boon for the CIO who understands the technology and is willing to implement it across the enterprise.
There are four key areas related to virtualization that CIOs need to understand and keep on top of:
- Managing your enterprise virtualization approach. Implementing virtualization isn’t something that should be rushed. While it’s tempting to try to keep up with other organizations and earn bragging rights for being “in the cloud” or “75% virtualized,” the fact of the matter is that the approach must be cautious. Your virtualization strategy will touch every aspect of the enterprise, including desktop machines, applications, servers and other infrastructure.
- Monitoring the enterprise virtualization environment. The monitoring tools used by IT in the past aren’t quite sufficient in a virtualized environment. There are newer tools that have been used to establish what your users’ typical use patterns are throughout the day, week, month and year. These monitoring tools are essential to provisioning – making sure that every application gets the resources it needs at the right time.
- Desktop virtualization isn’t always a viable option. There was a time that enterprises were so enthralled with how effective server virtualization had been that they concluded, incorrectly, that desktop virtualization must necessarily provide the same benefits. That’s not always the case. In fact, desktop virtualization can create its own bag of problems for your business. We’re not saying to take desktop virtualization off the table, but think long and hard about how to do it. And, don’t forget the BYOD trend, which throws a whole other concern into the desktop virtualization mix.
- Supporting disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Virtualization technologies, when properly deployed, offer benefits for your disaster recovery planning. Because disaster recover rarely gets its own line item in the budget, you need to find creative ways to make your systems able to survive major catastrophes and keep business running. Virtualization offers you an opportunity to do just that.
Today’s CIO is forced to deal with virtualization, like it or not. If you want your organization to come out on top, include these principles in your virtualization decision-making processes.
