Reasons to Move Business-Critical Applications to Virtual Machines

Moving applications and data to virtual machines – i.e. virtualizing these applications – is a major change for businesses. If anything were to go wrong with business-critical applications, a company would have a lot to worry about. Lack of familiarity with the concept of virtual machines often leads businesses to maintain their applications on the platforms already available rather than virtualize them. However, virtualization, along with a solid cloud backup functionality, is often the best way to protect business-critical applications from damage.

The Nature of Business-Critical Applications

Business-critical applications are all those that would have a significant negative effect on a business’s reputation if they were to go down. These include the most obvious applications that any business would use on a daily basis, such as billing systems, payment processing and other financial applications. Control systems, process automation and data acquisition systems are also critical for a business’s viability. Many businesses rely heavily on their systems for planning enterprise resources and the databases used to make such decisions.

What Prompts Businesses to Virtualize Business-Critical Applications?

The advantages of moving vital applications to virtual machines such as VMware and HyperV are manifold. For one thing, virtualization leads to a more standardized infrastructure, so that businesses are able to make their operations more streamlined. If the infrastructure is more predictable across all its components, it will be much easier to manage. Quality of service becomes more dependable when applications are virtualized.
Even more importantly, virtualization presents a great opportunity to implement an automated disaster recovery plan using cloud backup. It is much more cost-effective to back up virtual machines than physical ones. Disaster recovery with VMs can also include such features as testing that is repeatable, auditable and undisruptive. In general, application testing on VMs is much more reliable, making large projects much more feasible at every step of the way.

More Virtual Tools by the Month

Virtualization providers such as VMware and HyperV are constantly upgrading their platforms to make it easier for businesses to virtualize their most important applications. For businesses that took a look at the state of VMs just a few years ago, the current level of sophistication makes the field virtually unrecognizable. Functionality is growing at such a rapid pace that companies who found virtualization to be unrealistic a few years back are now quite eager to place all their data into virtual machines.
One of the main focuses of providers like VMware is to offer service that is predictable and dependable. By providing service of predictable quality, businesses that use these services will have an easier time orienting themselves on the VMs and building a cohesive infrastructure. They can also take advantage of any new tools provided by the VMs at their convenience.

Straightforward Setup for the Most Vital Applications

When virtualizing business-critical apps, the straightforwardness of the process is especially critical. The sophistication of virtualization platforms has increased to the point of not only providing numerous added functionalities, such as big data and high-performance computing applications, but also streamlining the process of virtualization itself. This is key for any businesses that still have qualms about moving their most precious programs onto a virtual machine. When that part is easy, the rest is like perusing a candy shop to see what other applications might come in handy.
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The KineticD Team