Symantec has announced its 2011 Indian findings of Virtualization and Evolution to the cloud Survey. The survey was also conducted in 35 other countries, demonstrating the growing challenge of managing disparate virtual, physical and cloud resources. This is due to the added complexity caused by the cloud for organizations, trying to protect and recover mission critical applications and data.

According to the survey the adoption of server virtualization is widespread,

• Out of the 200 Indian firms that participated in the survey, 57 percent are implementing server virtualization versus 45 percent globally.

• One-third of those surveyed, are either in the discussion or planning stage for private and hybrid cloud implementation.

• Of the companies surveyed, server virtualization and storage virtualization are more preferred with 31 and 26 percent of enterprises implementing. Private Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) however is the least accepted one with only 21 percent enterprises in its favor.

An excerpt from the Symantec whitepaper stated that performance is one of the main factors that may either drive virtualization or inhibit it. As the early investments have revealed that the results did not meet up with the high expectations. With the average shortfall in storage virtualization which is 31 percent with other disappointments coming in scalability, reducing operating expenditures, agility and keeping up with new trends.

The survey indicates that the most successful projects are the server virtualization projects. There is only a small 9 percent difference between expected goals and realized goals.

Security is another issue highlighted by Symantec’s survey, especially when the Sony Playstation, ImF, Citibank along with others having their information compromised. It is of little surprise that a huge 76 percent of the companies were concerned about security reasons.

“It is important to develop security to protect privacy of the corporate who wanted to store their data using cloud. As digital information in India will grow from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3-million petabytes (one petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes) over the next decade (2010 to 2020), twice as fast as the worldwide rate”, said, Symantec Director-Technology India and SAARC, Anand Naik.

Symantec recommends that technology firms make plans long before, about ways they could best use and modernize their current infrastructure to complement the implementation of hybrid/private cloud. As the revenue of firms from the cloud market is predicted to grow from $534 million to $ 3 billion by 2015, it was time the Indian firms learned to start adapting.

Related posts:

1. Virtualization to be a major IT business – Survey