Thirty-five per cent of companies in the GCC are already using virtual servers and 26 per cent intend to start using them within a year, said a report.

Companies in GCC mostly apply virtualization technologies to their databases, email and financial management applications, added the survey conducted by global anti-virus company Kaspersky Lab.

According to the survey, 71 per cent of the services which have been virtualized are business-critical.

“Virtualization technologies are now at the peak of their development and have already reached sufficient maturity to allow companies to virtualize their most important business applications & servers, storing and processing their confidential data on virtual machines,” said Vladimir Udalov, senior corporate product marketing manager at Kaspersky Lab.

“This calls for high standards in both the performance and security of the virtual infrastructure. Traditional security technologies are not always able to provide such a balance so we advise companies to pay attention to specific solutions specially designed for virtual environments.”

Despite the rapid growth of virtualization, 21 per cent of the GCC IT specialists surveyed said that they had only basic knowledge in this area, sufficient to carry out daily duties but little more. Only 7 per cent of the respondents regarded themselves as experts with extensive knowledge, while in the US this figure is 38 per cent.

However, the survey shows that GCC countries have been using virtualization technologies for just as long as the seemingly more experienced US and European markets: the average period here is almost two years, which matches global figures. – TradeArabia News Service