5 Profitable Benefits of Virtualization in Cloud Computing
Virtualization has become an incredibly useful tool in cloud computing due to its ability to create multiple, easily replicated instances of an entire operating system or application environment. This capability allows cloud providers to offer their users more flexibility, durability, and control over their resources than they would have with traditional resources like physical servers. Virtualization has made many things possible that would’ve previously been impossible in cloud computing. In fact, virtualization makes cloud computing what it is today since, without it, the public cloud wouldn’t exist or be nearly as effective at what it does. Virtualization and cloud computing are two sides of the same coin.
These five benefits of virtualization in cloud computing are great examples of why it’s such an important part of cloud computing today.
1) Agility
Businesses often deploy technology in order to be more agile. The goal is to move quickly, adjust course as necessary and adapt quickly to changing business conditions. Because it’s a relatively new way of doing things for many businesses, there are still questions about what it takes to be truly agile and whether or not virtualization makes that easier. Experts say that integrating virtualization into your cloud computing strategy will make all aspects of your business more agile. You’ll have better access to resources, which can help you respond faster, as well as an overall better understanding of what technologies are best suited for particular situations because they provide higher levels of flexibility.
Not too long ago, virtualization in cloud computing was only available through enterprise-level cloud hosting providers, because of the high cost and complexity of the technology involved. But thanks to the rise of open-source cloud platforms, anyone can use virtualization in cloud computing to make their own private or public cloud infrastructure.
2) Manageability
An advantage of virtualization with cloud computing is that you can scale up or down your environment to match demand. Since it’s a shared, dynamic environment, you aren’t responsible for managing multiple instances of your applications and have more time to focus on core business tasks. With an agile IT department, you can make sure your services are being allocated as efficiently as possible. For example, virtual machines running at less than 25% capacity could be consolidated into a single instance to give added computing power to VMs that need it. The result? Reduced costs and a simplified approach to running business applications.
3) Scalability
Scalability is an essential benefit of virtualization and cloud computing. If your project grows to need more hardware, you can simply clone or spin up new servers, add them to your network, and continue to work as usual. This saves time on hardware procurement, improves efficiency due to less downtime and reduced energy consumption, allows you to access resources anywhere via cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Platform, or IBM Bluemix. With virtualization, there is also increased flexibility since if your business needs change dramatically over time you can rapidly switch between platforms and alter configurations at any time with no impact on performance.
4) Recovery
It’s impossible to guarantee your virtualized workloads will always be available, but it is possible to have them back up and running quickly after a failure. When using cloud computing services, you may still lose time and money when hardware fails or during maintenance windows. However, thanks to zero-downtime features like live migration and cloud bursting, virtualized applications can failover without any downtime. This cuts down on administrative costs since you don’t need help from IT professionals or operations staff for routine tasks like adding more servers—all you need to do is a reboot (restart) a virtual machine into another host or cluster with no downtime. As such, there are only benefits of virtualization in cloud computing that help keep your organization functioning at peak performance levels.
5) Business Continuity
There are two major reasons why companies choose to make use of virtualization: increased flexibility and higher server uptime. In a physical data center, a hardware failure could mean a disaster for your business. However, with virtualization, you can create up to hundreds (if not thousands) of isolated servers within a single-host server that all rely on one piece of hardware. In other words, if one server fails or is compromised for any reason, there is no need to worry about taking down your entire network—the rest will continue operating normally. Sites like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have made virtualization in cloud computing increasingly popular.
Ultimately
Using virtualization in cloud computing can provide big benefits, and there were just five of them. You’ve probably heard of cloud computing, and you know that it can save your business money and increase the efficiency of your operations. While it’s true that cloud computing allows you to reap these benefits, many businesses are hesitant to embrace the technology because they aren’t sure what they need in order to make it work. But if you use virtualization in cloud computing, even as an add-on or backup service, you can actually save money while increasing the effectiveness of your business!