6 Ways to Reduce Your Costs with a Virtual Machine Solution

In his post, Six major trends for Email Security Companies, Mike discusses the trend of virtualization and the cloud.

In case you still need convincing, here are 6 ways to reduce your IT costs through optimization of resource utilization:

• Regroup various servers and services into a single powerful hardware server with several VMs sharing the same physical resources
• Scale your VMs up and down according to their resource requirements, company headcount, email volume
• Reduce the number of hardware servers and thus reduce costs: electricity bills (power, cooling), rack and floor space, maintenance and upgrades (parts, labor)
• Improve the turnaround: a new VM can be up and running within minutes, whereas a physical server takes hours or even days to setup
• Streamline your software and security update processes since each VM runs as an independent server: installing the latest Windows patches or upgrading to IIS 7 on your web server VM will have no effect on   your email security VM
• Simplify backup and business recovery and email continuity plans
• Increase security with independent VMs and an invisible host OS: each VM has its own service, a security breach in one service/VM doesn’t carry over to the other services/VMs and each service VM has lesspotential security risks than a single machine with multiple services.

Using virtual machines can you save you real money with immediate results.