BANGALORE, INDIA: Every enterprise today understands the need to be virtualized. However, many still hesitate to tread that last mile to become one. Until recently enterprises were wary of letting an external tool pry over their physical as well as virtual machines and considered virtualization an 'easy-said-than-done' mode. Owing to this, a large segment of the addressable market is not yet tapped.

However, is it just the security concerns that have been preventing this 'old technology' from becoming part of mainstream technology? The facts say a different story altogether because fundamental aspects of security remain the same for both physical and virtual machines.

Virtual desktops involve no local storage of user data, and therefore data security is effectively built into the architecture. So security concerns, though many more patches and vulnerabilities are to be addressed, alone cannot prevent this technology from gaining currency. An interesting fact is that not until recently did Apple allow its Macintosh OS to be virtualized!

Where do we lack?
Enterprises are today more than ever cashing in on this 'over a decade old technology'. However, the IT infrastructure management solutions have only recently caught up with its growth and this in turn paves way for an overall lack of IT maturity in India.

For an organization to take up desktop virtualization, it should have an experience with server virtualization, so as to come in terms with the latter's requirements. They should have a detailed assessment of the existing infrastructure and objectives (which calls for a lot of time and money), and implementation of a number of tools that facilitate streamlined management of the virtual environment. 

Somak Roy, managing analyst, Butler Group, says: "Organizations with such level of IT maturity are rare in India, outside the IT/ITES and BFSI sectors. However, with the growth of domestic IT outsourcing the benefits of server and endpoint virtualization would be increasingly accessible to the average Indian company as well."

Thus, there is a huge gap in terms of skill at the strategic and technical level. Organizations are still stuck at the basic level of what, where and how. On the other hand, those who have taken the first steps had to back out soon because 'graphics-heavy applications do not perform well with virtual desktop'. 

"IT needs to have a big enough profile for management to think of a fundamentally different way of running the data centre and possibly end-user computing. A lot of testing time is required and related technologies such as back-up software need to be implemented. However, that's still not the situation in most companies in India across non IT-intensive sectors. The current economic environment offers a serious enough incentive to make the necessary investments to achieve lower operational costs in the long run," Somak adds.

Overall, virtualization implementation is a time-consuming activity, and the typically understaffed Indian IT organization can rarely take time off from managing day-to-day operations.