The Most Cost-Effective Way to Enable Always On IT
In today’s highly automated, technology-enabled economy, business capability has become inextricably linked to IT capability. As IT infrastructure has become increasingly complex, it can best be described as inflexible, brittle, and costly. In fact, the typical company spends upwards of 70 to 80 percent of their IT budget to simply maintain the status quo, leaving the business starved for innovation. Some organizations have reached a point where business opportunity is literally trapped in IT infrastructure.
Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) face many of the same IT challenges as larger businesses, trying to accommodate increasing demand for new IT capabilities and services. SMBs often place even greater emphasis on cost savings and on protecting business critical systems and data, since shrinking IT staff and budgets and a “do more with less” mantra make it extremely difficult to simultaneously maintain day-to-day business operations (keeping the lights on) and invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow.
SMB Challenges Today
- Leveraging existing IT assets. SMBs typically do not have a lot of discretionary cash to outlay – they need costeffective
solutions that can better leverage their existing server, storage, and network resources.
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Increasing the efficiency of IT professionals. Most SMBs have limited IT headcount and spend too much of their time on monotonous IT maintenance activities. IT departments need easy-to-use solutions that can automate their tasks and simplify their IT environments, thus reducing the amount of time they spend managing and maintaining them.
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Improving availability and ensuring business continuity. SMBs need efficient ways to back up and restore production systems while minimizing downtime. While most SMBs employ some back up processes, very few actually test it for recovery capabilities. SMBs need to consider a full business continuity plan to ensure recovery of business-critical systems at all times – or risk losing their businesses.
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Testing applications prior to production. Industry analysts suggest that a large portion of unplanned downtime is caused
by application and production errors, costing significant amounts of lost productivity and IT staff time to correct. Unfortunately, there is often little time or staging infrastructure for thorough patch testing, migration, or upgrade projects at SMBs. These organizations need to create pre-production or testing environments to test solutions before deployment to avoid costly problems after they go live.
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Deploying applications in a secure environment. After these business applications have been thoroughly tested, they need to be deployed into secure environments to protect the livelihood of SMBs. |
Value Proposition
Virtualization technology simplifies IT so that companies can more effectively utilize their storage, network, and computing resources to control costs and respond faster. The virtual approach to IT management creates virtual services out of the physical IT infrastructure, enabling administrators to allocate these resources quickly to the highest priority applications and the business needs that require them the most.
With virtualization, hardware management is completely separated from software management, and hardware equipment can be treated as a single pool of processing, storage, and networking resources to be reallocated on the fly to various software services. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them – while administrators gain the ability to efficiently manage and optimize resources to serve the needs of the business. VMware equips SMBs with technology solutions that allow them to cost effectively optimize the use of their existing IT assets and resources as well as protect the systems, data, and applications that run the business, ensuring Always On IT. With analysts predicting the adoption of virtualization among SMBs to double in the next 24 months, these benefits are making this compelling technology a mainstream mandate.
Key Benefits
- Slash capital costs through consolidating servers and containing additional hardware spend. VMware virtualization delivers improved utilization of their servers, resulting in fewer resources to manage, power, store, and buy – enabling SMBs to increase utilization rates for x86 servers from 5-15 percent up to 60-80 percent.
- Enhance staff productivity and improve business responsiveness. VMware vSphere solutions are easy to deploy, use, and manage. They provide IT professionals
with the freedom to be released from menial tasks, enabling them to take a more strategic role in the enterprise. Managing a virtual infrastructure allows IT professionals to quickly connect and manage resources to meet ever-changing business needs. VMware virtualization can result in faster provisioning of new applications in minutes, not weeks, and can accelerate change request response times from hours or days to just minutes.
- Deliver affordable business continuity. VMware solutions offer complete data protection, truly continuous application availability and automated disaster recovery across physical sites – capabilities previously too costly and complex for SMBs to consider. VMware virtualization helps SMBs protect critical data and applications that keep the business running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance, eliminating the need for maintenance windows.
- Improve application quality and deployment. With VMware virtualization, SMBs can test more applications by optimizing pre-production staging environments, resulting in less downtime for the applications that run and drive the business.
- Strengthen security. VMware virtualization enables automated patch management of server hosts and virtual machines and an integrated firewall that maintains security policies across the mobile, flexible environment and decreases operational costs of managing them.
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What is the value of your data? This is a question all business owners should ask themselves seriously. Most companies see their backup as a hassle rather than the savior it is. The fact is that more and more companies have integrated technology into their infrastructure without upgrading their backup solutions. With document imaging and high end graphics becoming more predominate and storage cost decreasing, most companies have lost control of their data and forget the true value until something is lost.