| | February 20188CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONWHY VIRTUALIZE? THERE IS MORE TO THE STORYSayed Peerzade is the Group CIO of the Entertainment arm of the major conglomerate of India, Reliance. His group carries a broad entertainment portfolio, including films, television, New Media & Internet. Sayed has over 17 years of experience, across domains like, ISP, Retail, Banking, Internet, Media and Entertainment in his career.By Sayed Peerzade, Group CIO at Reliance Big Entertainmentirtualization is much, much more than using virtual machine software to create virtual clients or servers. Organizations need to explore all types of virtualization to get a complete picture of the potential benefits.I read and hear many things about virtualization in various forums from colleague CIOs, while many vendors as such don't think that all of this is making the whole picture visible. First of all, Virtualization is far more than merely using virtual machine software. Virtualization is something that has been around for quite a long time. Following, I believe, are some of benefits we can derive from Virtualization technology. I won't claim it covers all but covers significant and major benefits for organisations1. Help move things to the cloudAh yes, the cloud! You knew it was coming at some point in this list, didn't you? As much as you think you've been talked to death about virtualizing your environment, that probably doesn't even compare to the amount of times in the last year alone that you've had someone talk to you about joining "the cloud." The good news here is that by virtualizing your servers and abstracting away the underlying hardware, you are preparing yourself for a move into the cloud. The first step may be to move from a simple virtualized data center to a private cloud. 2. Extend the life of older applicationsLet's be honest -- you probably have old legacy applications still running in your environment. These applications probably VSayed Peerzade
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