A Scale Computing survey of more than 3,000 IT professionals, released in March, yielded a look at IT strategies for data management — specifically, whether companies want to put all their data on the cloud or use virtualization.
Virtualization is the use of desktops or services that are displayed on one system but are actually hosted by a server. With the data housed elsewhere, virtualized software tends to be faster, more flexible and more integrated than traditional, desktop-bound programs. Companies have an option to either use their own network servers for virtualization or use full cloud-computing services, where data is housed in servers outside the company.
While many advocate external cloud computing as a way to decrease costs and make data management easier, IT employees are apparently a more worried crowd: 90 percent of Scale Computing’s respondents said that they wanted to keep “mission-critical” applications on a local infrastructure instead of moving them into the cloud.
Still, nearly a quarter of the companies in the survey had some part of their virtualized interface in the cloud — usually infrastucture related to testing, development or lower-risk applications. By contrast, IT professionals preferred to keep critical data close to home, where it could be protected and limited to intranet use.
The survey also uncovered a burgeoning market for data management backup systems and disaster recovery services among smaller companies (those with less than 500 employees). Data backup solutions ranked equally with security when it came to key data concerns. Around 93 percent of respondents in the small business category also indicated that they needed technical support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — a nod toward the increased flexibility of work hours and workflow timeframes among small businesses.
These companies also cited greater efficiency and consolidation as primary motivation to move into virtualization. IT professionals also said they were least concerned about the brand-name recognition of the company providing virtualization services for them.
Companies’ preferences for virtualization illustrate the continued need for experts in this area of IT. A blog for Indeed.com, the popular job-search engine, notes that both cloud and virtualization experts enjoy strong job growth, but cloud computing, overall, is gaining ground more quickly. Other reports emphasize “the cloud” as a hotbed of jobs: The 2011 Sand Hill Group report, for example, noted that 11 cloud companies added 800,000 U.S. jobs in 2010 alone. It predicted that companies selling cloud services will grow revenues in this area by an average of $20 billion a year, generating up to 472,000 jobs worldwide by 2016.
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