One of the things to watch out this year would be virtualization.

It has been popularly rumored, argued and dissected by technology experts that it is a huge cost-cutting technology. Single handedly it slashes the down the IT infrastructure cost management. Virtualization in layman terms can be explained thus : It is making just one computer do the job of a room full of computers by making it share its data across various operating environments.

On the positive side, virtualization helps organizations to have multiple applications running on multiple operating systems across multiple local and geographic locations. This means less dependency on hardware and more movement. What more is that, the virtual servers will help in saving the overhead expenses that might occur otherwise. Since everything is virtual, there would be better accessibility to all the resources, higher security(data encryption) and reduced downtime and better recovery in case of data failure.

While it is true that virtualization comes with a set of benefits, it also has a flip side. In fact, quite a few. To begin with not all IT companies are pro virtualization because they feel that there would be a lot of networking issues than what can be anticipated. The hardware sellers are also not so happy with this because their sales will come down and they now have to manufacture hardware that supports virtualization.

Virtualization means reduced costs benefit but the it’s implementation costs a lot of time and manpower. As virtualization is on an evolutionary up curve not all organizations can or have the necessary knowledge to manage it, especially if there an data failure at the service provider’s end. The result would of this could be a huge disaster that might make organizations go bankrupt. And as no one is asking organization to take a giant leap of faith into this transition without having a backup, they should have a good ROI plan before getting started.

Virtualization technology is a completely different ball game altogether, so the technology and the non technology end users need to be trained significantly.

Though, this has its own pitfalls, the total number of companies opting for virtualization across the world is steadily increasing. It is exactly how we felt when emails replaced snail mails.

Bottom line is that change is inevitable.