Effect of Virtualization on Enterprise Network, Server/Desktop Systems on Small and Mid-Size Businesses (SMB)

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Enterprise network infrastructure has profoundly impacted information systems business world. As small, mid-size businesses, various devices and data move beyond the traditional security of the corporate landscape, cyber-attacks will continue to grow at an exponential proportion. In 2012, network security gurus experienced cyber dangers ranging from sophisticated advanced persistent threats, to firewire attacks, to lost or stolen laptop. Enterprise network's mobile endpoints are literally moving targets and until they are adequately secured against attacks, enterprise business intelligence, reputation or competitiveness are at risk The goal of this article included the following: 1. To identify the extent mid- size organizations have adopted or planned to adopt virtualization technology 2012. 2. Identify potential barriers that cause enterprise systems to postpone or decide not to adopt virtualization. 3. Identify among adopting firms, what virtualization products are most popular and which applications are most commonly virtualized? 4. Identify the core drivers that cause enterprise systems to be virtualized. LITERATURE REVIEW Berde et al. (2009) among others noted that virtualization is not a perfect solution to how organizations manage their resources but concluded that this technology provides tremendous capabilities on how enterprise systems manage and move operating systems into different hardware resources. Grid computing evolved as an innovative technology, and is distinguished from traditional distributed networks because of its large-scale resource sharing capabilities. The author further explained that grid computing allows large numbers of hardware components to act as a single device, thereby, pooling their capacity and re-allocating these components to different jobs. Ercan (2010) argued that in the next generation of Grids, applications will not necessarily be designed to run on certain piece of hardware or network, but will be written to consume certain types of resources, which could be provided anywhere on the network. He further summarized that to accomplish this, enterprise systems and technical gurus need more dynamic networks than are at the present time existence. However, noted that virtualization efforts the networking community are already moving the industry that direction. Fiedler and Gallenkamp (2008), their study reviled that virtualized infrastructure provides a layer of abstraction between computing storage, networking hardware, and the applications running on it. Their study further explained that the deployment of virtual infrastructure is nondisruptive to the system, because the user experiences are typically un-noticed or unchanged. The authors concludes by emphasizing that virtual infrastructure provide enterprise system management, the opportunity to manage pooled resources across the enterprise, thereby, allowing Information Technology (IT) managers to be more responsive to dynamic system needs to better leverage infrastructure investments. Early studies by Burry et al. (2004), Brandel (2004), Cannor (2005), found evidence that virtualization has been a part of the IT landscape for decades but today vendors are now conveying remuneration to industry-standard X86-based platforms which now encompass the preponderance of desktops, laptops and server shipments. They concluded by stating that a major benefit of virtualization is the ability of systems to run multiple operating systems on a single physical system while sharing the underlying hardware resources or partitioning. More recent studies have concluded that virtualization can apply to a range of system layers, including hardware-level virtualization, operating system- level virtualization, and high-level language virtual machines (Morana et al., 2011; Seyler et al., 2011; Tusa & Mikkilinemi, 2011) . …