Cloud migration is not a new concept for many small businesses. It eliminates the need for on-premises servers, which can save costs, and it facilitates remote work and collaboration. However, as SMBs’ interest in artificial intelligence continues to grow, some businesses could look to reassess their infrastructure to determine whether it’s meeting today’s needs.
For many SMBs, virtualization is a practical starting point for hybrid infrastructure. Small businesses can use hypervisors to run virtualized workloads locally while integrating with cloud platforms for backup, scaling and new services.
Induprakas Keri, senior vice president and general manager for hybrid multicloud at Nutanix, explains that small businesses need to move fast, often have strained IT administrators and are cost sensitive.
DISCOVER: Modernize your virtualization and hypervisor strategy.
“Virtualization helps in all these areas. By enabling mobility, small businesses can start in a specific environment that’s optimized for experimentation (such as public clouds) and move workloads on-prem later to optimize for cost,” he says. “Furthermore, by baking security and isolation into the virtualization layer, small business IT administrators can scale more easily to address the demands of their business.”
It's important for SMBs to understand how virtualization works in relation to hybrid infrastructure, the capabilities it supports and how to set the organization up for success when implementing virtualization as a foundation for hybrid infrastructure.
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How Does Virtualization Support Hybrid Infrastructure?
Virtualization provides three critical functions that are foundational to a hybrid infrastructure, says Keri, including security and isolation, mobility, and resource scheduling and optimization.
“Without the functionality provided by the layer of virtualization, workload security, migration and performance all become difficult if not impossible in a hybrid environment,” he says.
The key capabilities provided by virtualization in a hybrid environment, Keri says, include:
- Security. Virtualization provides a layer of abstraction that secures the underlying system resources and application data from malicious intent.
- Isolation. Having virtualization in place ensures that multiple workloads that share the same underlying infrastructure are isolated from each other.
- Mobility. It allows SMBs to abstract and virtualize the underlying infrastructure and provides data access that enables mobility across different infrastructures.
- Resource management and optimization. With virtualization, SMBs can manage system resources such as compute and graphics processing units and network interface cards so that the underlying physical infrastructure can serve the greatest number of workloads at the lowest cost.
By baking security and isolation into the virtualization layer, small business IT administrators can scale more easily to address the demands of their business.”
Induprakas Keri
Senior Vice President and General Manager for Hybrid Multicloud, Nutanix
Virtualization Implementation Best Practices for SMBs
Keri emphasizes that to ensure a solid foundation for hybrid infrastructure, SMBs need to avoid vendor lock-in, prioritize ease of use for infrastructure management and demand exceptional support from their technology partners.
“By far, the biggest challenge that SMBs can run into during implementation is how overwhelmed their IT personnel may be while managing the systems and tools needed to run a small business,” he adds. “To that end, it’s important to work with a vendor or partner that provides a mature product that’s easy to use, combined with exceptional support.”
Working with a trusted managed service provider on virtualization can be beneficial for an SMB, according to Keri, in that it augments in-house IT personnel as the business adopts virtualization as a critical layer in its software stack.
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