The current buzz in the ICT arena is all around cloud computing and the platform on which it is based, virtualisation. However, there remains a perception among small and medium enterprise (SME) businesses that virtualisation is something that is only of interest to the national and multinational market spaces.
"The perception is created because many people view a virtualised environment as something that is difficult to implement and maintain. There is also a view that specialist skills are required, meaning it will be an expensive undertaking," says Greg Wilson, CEO at Reflex Solutions.
"In fact, virtualisation can work for anyone, because it is a solution that will make your business operations easier. The problem, especially for the smaller businesses, is that the decision-makers tend not to correctly understand the cost justification. Without that understanding, it can appear expensive from the outside."
Wilson says for SMEs especially, the benefits of virtualisation are numerous. He points out that SMEs gain access to many big business features, such as disaster recovery and quick deployment time on new software.
"Once you drill down into the cost savings that can be made, you quickly realise that the perception of expense is just that, a perception. There are specific SME bundles designed to bring down the licensing costs, and of course lack of physical hardware means you are saving on the cost of a server," he says.
However, it is when one looks beyond the initial areas that one sees the real cost savings. Virtualising your environment will save your IT staff enormous amounts of time. There will be less physical maintenance required for the hardware and therefore fewer in-house skills required. Backups are easier, making disaster recovery a simpler task. In addition to this, a virtualised environment enables quicker deployment time for new services and makes research and development easier."
Reflex`s success in the virtualisation space is driven by the fact that the company is able to show customers very strong levels of return on investment (ROI), according to Wilson. He says Reflex offers its customers full service business solutions designed to meet their requirements.
"Virtualisation is simply a tool we utilise to achieve this. Reflex has both the capability of building a complete virtualised environment for a customer, or - for those businesses that are very small - we can offer them space in our own virtualised data centre environment. This means that however small the organisation, it can obtain the benefits of virtualisation."
He points out that an organisation with fewer than 50 employees would never before have had the wherewithal to separate applications as diverse as e-mail, active directory, time and attendance, customer relationship management (CRM) and CCTV recording onto individual servers due to the cost involved, this created an unstable difficult to manage environment; however, by making use of Reflex`s own data centre, virtualisation can now be brought within their reach.
"Virtualisation makes all of the above possible for an organisation of any size. And, of course, partnering with a business like Reflex means you will not only get the solution tailored to your exact business requirements, but also the skills and experience needed to ensure your virtualised environment operates optimally, 100% of the time," concludes Wilson.
Share