Kelvin Middleton, Webhelp’s Chief Technology Officer, outlines the benefits – and risks of virtualisation in business growth.
There is no denying the importance that businesses put on technology in-fulfilling their strategic objectives. For many industries and businesses, technology advancements have been accelerated by COVID-19 in line with the fourth industrial revolution (industry 4.0). This is coupled with cyber and resilience risk, which continues to be an increasing focus for businesses, governments, regulators and consumers.
Virtualisation is a key component for all businesses looking to advance their offering, and ensure that they have robust and modern technology to meet their user needs.
What is virtual infrastructure?
Traditionally, IT infrastructure has been made up of a collection of physical resources like servers, routers and firewalls. Virtualisation refers to the transition of these from physical resources to software, a virtual representation of its former self. So instead of a piece of hardware only performing one dedicated task you can now run lots of virtual instances on the same hardware all performing different tasks simultaneously.
Virtualisation is not a new technology – its history reaches back to the sixties – but as you look at this technology over the decades you see changes and improvements coupled with leaps in hardware manufacturing and software development. What once required significant upfront investment in decentralised and complex compute, network and storage infrastructures can now be achieved using inexpensive commodity hardware. This hardware centralises the infrastructure into modular blocks of compute, network and storage, which can be easily expanded over time. Welcome the hyper-converged revolution of the noughties.
Real world application and benefits vary, but one of the original considerations surrounded cost optimisation, allowing businesses to fully utilise the infrastructure capacity by making it perform more than one task at once. However, as incremental improvements in hardware and software were developed over time then virtualisation came to include enhanced redundancy, security, scalability, and reliability, each with their own pros and cons. As a result, business value realisation moved beyond optimising the IT budget and into the territory of providing competitor differentiation, and therefore increased revenues. As an example, consider the reduction in manufacturing times due to shorter R&D lifecycles, owing to the increased capability that virtualisation can provide.
In more recent years, virtualisation has expanded to include that which once required dedicated and/or specialist hardware, such as a network router, firewall and even telephone system. Now, however, even these components can be deployed virtually, which can massively reduce a business’ latency in change activities without compromising on reliability.
Risk
Like any technology, virtualisation comes with risks as well as benefits. Omit upskilling and investing in your engineers to ensure they know how to support new technologies, and you risk poor implementation, downtime and compromised security.
One potential pitfall is borne from the usual budget challenges targeting technology teams to do more with less – one of the selling points to virtualisation. Push this to an extreme, however, and you risk stacking the deck too narrowly, with virtual workloads operating on too few physical points of redundancy, so the cost of failure is extreme. Businesses need to strike the right balance of cost optimisation vs. redundancy.
Another concern businesses should evaluate and plan for is the security of an environment. With physical servers your attack surface could be dispersed, difficult to find, and therefore difficult to access. In the virtual world, the command-and-control plane can see, touch and destroy it all. Role-based access controls, multifactor authentication and data protection toolchains are the staples of today.
Cost management is another factor to consider in the world of virtualisation. People and process has traditionally always been the go-to for ensuring the controls are in place to manage growth, and therefore cost risk. But virtualisation has given businesses the opportunity to automate controls in the environment. Consider a new software development project which is able to simply, easily and programmatically create new virtual servers to provide the capacity needed to host a new project. Without the appropriate controls and governance in place, the self-serve benefits virtualisation enables can easily turn into a runaway train of infrastructure utilisation and unplanned expenditure.
The future
Old complex technology infrastructure is no longer adequate for modern businesses that need the agility and flexibility to execute change at pace. Virtual infrastructure is a key player in this space. Smart organisations will understand the need to strike a balance between investing for the future and delivering current priorities. Strategic changes to technology infrastructure must be addressed, providing businesses with the potential for scalability – making it easy to react quickly and safely deliver seamless solutions that really make an impact for their clients and customers.
