Stop Putting Off Virtualization Sales

By Chris Cramer, director of managed services, I.T. Works

What types of virtualization services are in big demand right now?

Clients are very interested in the private cloud (on-premise virtualized infrastructure of servers and PC's) and hybrid cloud (on-premise plus data center or managed cloud servers) which enables for guaranteed uptime and high availability disaster recovery. Starting in Q3 of last year, we have seen that the SMB community is now more understanding that "cloud" can be the virtualization of their infrastructure in a protected environment, and that their intellectual or virtualized property is in fact still their property. Whereas in the past, the common belief was "OK, I am in the cloud but where is it, who owns it, and what happens if something goes wrong with it?"

The biggest trend in virtualized service in our market has become the hybrid cloud model. From SMB to SME, our clients' servers need to be up and accessible 24/7/365. To ensure that this occurs, solutions are designed inside of our datacenter, where the clients' primary virtualized equipment is located with redundant Internet connections and dedicated circuits to their physical locations. By building this hybrid model, our clients have minimal equipment on-site offsetting various costs from cooling, electricity, and server maintenance. Of course there are also strong markets for hosted exchange, cloud monitoring, RMM tools, file level cloud backup of servers/PCs, and Cloud BDR.