The virtualisation of business processes and backup systems in South Africa may be stalling, owing to the poor implementation and management of such systems, says virtual infrastructure and data protection company Veeam channel manager Jessica van Wyk.

However, this stall can be overcome through advanced monitoring, right-sizing virtual environments, enabling capacity planning and increased reliability and recoverability for virtualisation, as well as the reporting needed for the effective management and measurement of a virtualised system, she notes.

“Virtualisation promised significant cost savings and a fast return on investment for companies, but failed to deliver on these promi- ses in the specific timeframes. Veeam provides VMware-certified products that enable com- panies to view and manage their entire virtual environment through a single console.”

Businesses in South Africa rapidly adopted virtualisation for noncritical applications, but stalled when the savings and reliability failed to materialise because the disparate programs did not share data correctly between them.

However, the lack of results is partly due to the loss of visibility and the restore capability of the system and companies not being able to overcome the learning curve and, subsequently, slowing down the adoption of virtualisation internally.

Veeam provides products to companies aiming for the effective operation of their virtual environments and enable interaction between disparate systems to ensure coherence of the integrated virtual environment, says Van Wyk.

“Veeam’s products analyse the company’s environment and equipment against industry best practices and provides a granular view of the environment to enable the company to effectively plan capacity use, which will ensure effec- tive resource use and functionality,” she says.

Legacy backup systems can be effectively virtualised and Veeam guarantees the functionality of its backups, compared with other legacy systems that do not test backups effectively, leading to a possible loss of working data when problems occur, says Van Wyk.

“Research and development is a core focus at Veeam and about 40% of our employees are dedi- cated to the development of improved products and systems.”

Uncertainty pertaining to virtualisation is a global phenomenon, despite increased virtuali- sation across global industries. A clear understanding and management of virtual environments enable companies to realise the return on the investment that they were expecting from a virtualised environment, she says.

Further, most companies operate in a hybrid physical-virtual heterogeneous business environment and Veeam offers strategic advice around best practices, bottleneck analysis and capacity planning, which enables it to recommend to companies how to use their existing equipment and systems effectively and plan strategically for future use, notes Van Wyk.

“Companies are hesitant to virtualise their business-critical applications – and with good reason. However, if one maps out the consolidation of an environment, then the original return on investment can be realised, which, along with increased confidence in recovery, will result in cost savings and reduced information technology (IT) system management,” she says.

Veeam focuses on enabling virtualisation to realise the promise of reducing risks for clients, savings on costs to manage IT systems and being effective.

“The key message is that virtual systems are easy to use and effective, if one uses the right tools to manage a business’s virtual environment – tools designed for the virtual world to assist in realising the full promise of virtualisation,” she concludes.