Virtualization and Cloud based technologies can help streamline your IT systems and business processes.

A practical example might help demonstrate:

One of my Client's runs a small business with 10 employees in total. They have staff based in Dublin, some in the UK, one in the US and a couple even farther afield. Traditionally they have deployed a Small Business Server which included Email and then installed their line of business application on this server. Remote users connected to the system through a VPN over the Internet. The problem of course was that the remote users could not always be guaranteed a good Internet connection and this affected their access to the line of business application and their all important Email. As the server got older and email database grew in size performing timely and effective backups became a problem.

The solution in this case embraced both cloud based services  and local virtualization technologies

• Email has been migrated to Office 365 allowing both remote and local users to access their email and collaboration services from anywhere
• The line of business application is migrated to the vendor cloud based version and all users have access from anywhere
• The local server is migrated to the latest Windows Standard Server and virtualized using Hyper-V, this has resulted in faster backup to local removable disk cartridge, no requirement to locally backup or protect email anymore and also allows them the option to use cloud based backup storage if they so decide
• Their Internet service has been upgraded to an E-Fibre connection

Result for the Client with greater flexibility for their staff as they could work anytime and in particular across time zones, local users are still catered for with the additional flexibility to work remotely far more easily. In addition Office 365 provided added value with the latest version of Office for all users across multiple devices.

The above is one practical example for  a small business and I provide similar services for clients including

• Office 365 configuration and migration services
• Larger scale on premise virtualization of server infrastructures  for Microsoft Windows and Linux based systems
• Legacy Application hosting using Hyper-V, VMware or thin Client Technologies
• Cloud Based Backup Solutions
• Virtualization of OpenVMS Alpha and VAX workloads on Intel hardware platforms

Quite a common misconception that I come across often is that Clients can confuse virtualization with cloud based services which is understandable as IT professionals often talk about them in the same context and whilst cloud bases services utilise virtualization technologies they are distinctly different. With this in mind you may find the following sections useful