Virtualization has long been a global IT trend – and GCC companies are keeping up with their international peers, according to the results of a survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab in the run-up to the launch of its new corporate security solution for virtual environments. The survey revealed that 35% of companies in GCC polled are already using virtual servers and 26% intend to start using them within a year.
Companies in GCC mostly apply virtualization technologies to their databases, email and financial management applications. According to the survey, 71% 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. 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,” said Vladimir Udalov, Senior Corporate Product Marketing Manager at Kaspersky Lab.
Despite the rapid growth of virtualization, 21% of the GCC IT specialists surveyed told us that they had only basic knowledge in this area, sufficient to carry out daily duties but little more. Only 7% of the respondents regarded themselves as experts with extensive knowledge, while in the USA this figure is 38%.
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.
