Cloud adoption is growing and it will drive virtualization too

• Growing cloud adoption will further drive the usage of virtualization globally and in India.
  
• According to the World Economic Forum, virtualization will save up to 25% of enterprises’ tech budgets by 2025.
  
• Application virtualization is predicted to make great strides in the next couple of years.

The last two years have crunched every budget and forced every strategy to ensure fast adoption of digitization. Businesses that are not digital yet, may not survive for much longer. The cloud is the new enterprise terra firma. As the cloud becomes an inseparable part of every organization’s growth strategy, virtualization is the path that everyone needs to take, especially organizations with a legacy as well as modern IT infrastructure, that need to ensure that there is no distinction between traditional virtualization platforms and modern container-based platforms.

The biggest driver for this growth will be the global shock that enterprises received when the world came to a standstill for two years- and the only saving grace for a disaster recovery plan, to allow for business continuity, was migrating data and all business processes to the cloud.

Sajith Chakkingal, Head of Global Technology Services & India Technology Centre, TMF Group - a global services firm, believes that cloud will be a key driver of growth for virtualization.

“Virtualization will continue to play a vital role globally and for Indian enterprises. Historically, since the time bare-metal became less of a priority for organizations, virtualization has helped reduce capex, opex and downtime while improving productivity and agility for organizations. I believe that virtualization is set to grow further as cloud services adoption grows. Cloud is nothing but virtualization in the background.”

The advantages of the cloud are everyday knowledge for anyone associated with technology in any industry. Businesses can survive only if their data and team collaboration interfaces are on the cloud, where information that is critical for smooth operations can be accessed by all employees. With a huge surge in services that can be delivered from the cloud, its adoption has increased manifold, taking its basic process- virtualization- with it.

Data Speaks

In totality, the demand for software that enabled these solutions is expected to double by 2025. According to Resreachandmarkets.com’s report - “Virtualization Software Market - Growth, Trends, Forecasts (2020 - 2025)”, ‘ the Virtualization Software Market was valued at $14.69 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $33.76 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 15.2%, during this period.

In this period, India’s spending on public cloud services reached $3.6 bn, and that is expected to grow to $9.5bn by 2025, maintains market research by IDC.

In a more recent 2022 TechTarget/Computer Weekly IT priorities survey, this data was re-iterated when more than 65% of IT leaders across enterprises in India confirmed that their enterprises were cloud-first, meaning they had fully adopted IoT and all other cloud-based tools to ensure seamless customer experience.

World Economic Forum figures say that virtualization will save up to 25% of enterprises’ tech budgets by 2025. Even more interestingly, with the adoption of the cloud and virtualization of enterprise processes, globally about 50% of energy costs can be saved in the same period, cutting down 180 million tons of carbon emissions, leading to $15 billion as savings for customers. This data is a clear indication of how increasing virtualization will impact the enterprise world in the coming years.

Having said that, while server virtualization has been adopted by almost 95% of the businesses, there are some forms of the technology that are still not quite there.

The next wave of growth, says Chakkingal, will be around application virtualization. “With the adoption of desktop and network virtualization maturing, application virtualization will go through a phase of double-digit growth in the next couple of years,” he says.

The future of virtualization

Storage virtualization (software-defined storage) is up ahead in terms of adoption with almost 40% of all enterprises having adopted it (according to a Spiceworks research), application and desktop virtualization are catching up slowly, and network virtualization (SDN or software-defined networking) is lagging still. Clearly, in the coming months, these will get a bigger focus as far as the adoption of technologies is concerned.

While most organizations have been able to at least set a roadmap for complete digitization, many continue to grapple with multiple infra assets. It’s a challenge to do that without stretching their IT resources, and one of the solutions is composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). It helps to silo the hardware into resource pools that are easier to manage and allow for handling different kinds of workloads ranging from pure virtual machines to bare metal.

Even though containerized applications are still around, virtualization platforms will be playing a growing role in application delivery soon, albeit in modified forms to suit consumer needs – the ability to handle increasingly innovative applications as well as addressing the need for increased flexibility and security.

Safe to say that over the next few years, virtualization will grow from strength to strength, though it will be continuously evolving to meet changing market needs- agility, flexibility, and portability across newer infrastructure, modernization, cloud maturity, or even security advancements.

The bottom line will be virtualization as technology will evolve, change, and modify itself to meet the core needs of the erstwhile cloud- which of course, is the future of all enterprises.
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