There has been a constant stream of change in virtualisation technologies over the past two years.
The first wave of virtualisation focused on specific platforms and hardware such as storage, servers, networks, and desktops. As virtualisation becomes commoditised, the next wave of this technology will change the way software is delivered, managed and consumed at the endpoint, thereby improving user productivity while reducing IT complexity.
Businesses need to use virtualisation to separate out valuable information, manage it easily, protect it completely and control it automatically.
In the last two years there has been a massive information explosion.
Today organisations are dealing with petabytes of data - and the amount is growing. The amount of stored information is growing at 50 percent a year.
Information is as distributed and mobile as today's workforce. It lives in hard-to-protect unstructured formats - e-mail, spreadsheets, and instant messages.
And as SaaS grows, customers' most sensitive data will often be found in the "cloud."
No decisions can be made by customers today about the management of that data without thinking about how they would secure it as well. We are seeing that securing information and managing information are not only converging, but also being thought about as a common process.
There are a number of key trends that will shape the future approaches customers use to manage the growing volume of information.
1. The ongoing migration from tape to disk is transforming the storage arena.
Operational control is improving - and the administrative burden and manual mishaps that often occur with tape are becoming scarcer.
Disk-based backup is speeding up the back-up process and helping customers recover key applications more quickly.
Down the road, improvements will continue as solid-state devices will help maximise performance for mission-critical applications and further accelerate the migration to disk.
Symantec believes we'll see a blurring of the lines between archiving, backup, and disaster recovery. What customers purchase today as separate products will come together as one solution... with better functionality to enable customers to manage their information more effectively.
2. The changing threat landscape
We're seeing a growing number of threats targeted at the information itself - not just the network or a device. In fact, during the last six months of 2007 nearly 70 percent of the most common malicious threats we received in our labs, were designed to steal confidential information.
To address this we must move to an information-centric security model. One that takes a risk-based approach to protecting customers' most important information - whether that be intellectual property, employee data, or customer information.
In this model, classifying data will become critical - that way customers will have insight into what sensitive information they have, where it's stored, and how it's being used - both on the network and at the endpoint.
3. IT governance trends are changing
Increasingly, mandates are driving organisations to take an enterprise-wide view of their risk posture and compliance status, with a bigger emphasis on the IT infrastructure.
As a result, IT will be asked to take a stronger leadership role across the organisation.
The continued convergence of technologies for security, information management, and compliance will make possible a new level of automation for IT - and organisations will be looking to IT to guide them through the process.
4. Virtualisation: Customers are looking to get even more out of their technology investments and to ensure they become more flexible and agile.
Server virtualisation is rapidly being adopted by enterprises to drive higher utilisation rates and reduce hardware costs.
Most servers today are less than 20 percent utilised. Through virtualisation, you should expect to achieve utilization rates of up to 80 percent.
As customers deploy into production environments, there's a whole new level of complexity to contend with - managing both the physical and the virtual environments.
Virtualisation isn't limited to the data center - customers are also looking to leverage virtualisation at the endpoint to ensure application availability and control costs.
Already, customers are seeing real benefits - with our Software Virtualisation Solution (SVS), one university was able to reduce the annual deployment time of a critical statistics application from several weeks to just two hours.
The real promise of endpoint virtualisation is about improving the user experience while enabling you to lower the cost of managing endpoint devices.
Paul Lancaster is Systems Engineering Director for Symantec Pacific [1], responsible for Symantec's Systems Engineering (Pre Sales) team operation for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Paul joined Symantec through the merger with VERITAS Software where he'd been since 2000. He has 10 years of experience in storage design, data protection planning, recovery and deployment strategies within the banking and telecommunications sectors.
www.symantec.com [2]