Virtualisation is the future as it not only saves a lot of money, but allows maximum utilisation of resources and is a green initiative, according to Inbox Financial Sector Institutions General Manager Khurram Kaleem.
Addressing an event on Thursday, which highlighted how organisations could secure their data with the latest technology, Kaleem said that virtualisation can do wonders for any company. “Savings are about 50 per cent on your overall routine work including, not just IT, but also operational costs – capital and operating expenditures,” he said.
Kaleem explained that with virtualisation all resources were bundled together and used as a common platform. It is when common resources were used for multiple tasks. Prior to that, every application had a separate hardware system for operations and that had changed with virtualisation, he said.
Referring to a study which Inbox conducted in Pakistan for an IT company, Kaleem said that the company was using 50 servers but with virtualisation, these were replaced with just 10, at $5,000 per server. “This is a remarkable number in terms of cost savings, in terms of bandwidth reduction, in terms of power and cooling requirements,” he said.
Companies in Pakistan are becoming larger and more elaborate, their data management and security needs are growing and they need to better manage and secure their data, according to experts. They pointed out that even mid-sized businesses were pursuing more virtualisation and security measures to deal with diverse business applications and data.
IBM’s Data Protection and Retention Sales Leader Mena Migally, who presented IBM’s new data protection system, believed that retail and healthcare were two industries which were untapped and lagging behind in terms of data security.
Migally explained that healthcare (hospitals) have to conform to a lot of requirements to ensure patient records are maintained. This was also the case with the retail industry.
Migally added that a lot of industries in Pakistan, mainly banking and telecommunications, were very rich in terms of their IT infrastructure, however, other industries lagged behind. “There is also a lot of room for other industries like the oil and gas sector in terms of their backup and retention,” he said.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 29th, 2011.
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