Only 14% Of Companies Have Virtualized Mission-Critical Applications

There is a significant gap in the pace of adoption of virtualization for non-critical systems versus mission-critical systems, according to a poll of company executives.

In particular, the results show that the majority of companies have yet to move Tier 1, mission-critical applications to virtual environments. Despite widely acknowledging the benefits of virtualization, most companies noted that they need more evidence that mission-critical applications will succeed in virtual environments.

While 83 percent report they have virtualized their non-critical applications and systems, in stark contrast, only 14 percent of respondents reported that they have fully virtualized "Tier 1" applications. With regard to those mission-critical applications, respondents said they were 50 percent more likely to virtualize applications used by employees than to virtualize the applications that directly interact with customers.

When asked about the primary obstacles preventing the virtualization of mission-critical applications, respondents cited '”people issues,” performance and design concerns as most the common. In fact, 52 percent of companies noted that application owners have blocked the project to virtualize a Tier 1 application. At the same time, 49 percent worry that the applications aren't designed to support virtualization and 45 percent cited concerns about performance degradation once virtualized.

While these concerns persist, there is wide recognition that compelling benefits exist when companies virtualize mission-critical applications. 59 percent strongly agree that virtualization would result in server consolidation and related power and cooling savings, while 49 percent strongly agree that failover/disaster recovery capabilities would improve in a virtual environment. 41 percent agree that their IT agility and responsiveness to the business would improve. Yet, the majority of companies still expressed a lack of confidence that their applications could succeed in virtual environments.

The survey was conducted by AppDynamics, an Application Performance Management (APM) company serving cloud and virtual environments, to understand enterprise efforts to virtualize business applications.

Comment by Jyoti Bansal, CEO of AppDynamics: What application owners are missing is hard evidence that their application will perform acceptably once it is in a virtual environment. They are under intense pressure to ensure that applications experience 100% uptime and meet strict performance SLAs, and they are looking to virtualization teams to show them that this transition won't affect service quality. It's on the shoulders of the virtualization teams to demonstrate that virtualization won't impact their ability to achieve business objectives. By baselining performance in the non-virtualized environment and capturing detailed performance metrics, companies can provide an apples-to-apples comparison pre-and post-virtualization. This is a great first step to encourage the virtualization of mission-critical applications."

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