Going virtual: popular trend or real prospect for enterprise information systems

Abstract

Organisations are faced with a number of challenges and issues in decentralised, multiple-server, physical, non-virtualized IT environments. Virtualization in recent years has had a significant impact on computing environments and has introduced benefits, including server consolidation, server and hardware utilization and reduced costs. Virtualization’s popularity has led to its growth in many IT environments. This paper provides an overview of the IT challenges in non-virtualized environments and addresses the question of whether virtualization provides the solution to these IT challenges.