Companies of every size and kind are making the transition to an integrated infrastructure as a way to implement cloud computing, streamline their business and keep costs down. It's also a way to increase the performance of important applications and keep the IT service efficient. Integrated infrastructures also help with stability as many companies simply don't have the capacity to power such applications.

Although many of my fellow business owners and leaders understand the importance of resource consolidation, virtulaization and simplification of their infrastructure management, we're not all adopting them at the same rate or for the same uses. Some are just starting out on the path towards virtualization and some are using them for the vast majority of their operational applications. For those just delving into the world of virtualization, time, available manpower and budgetary concerns may be what's holding them back. One way in which they can get past this hurdle is to use a ready-to-deploy, pre-wired, and pre-integrated virtualized infrastructure.

Companies no longer have to spend hours and thousands of dollars building an infrastructure from scratch. In addition to this advantage, it's compact, increases scalability, deploys quickly and makes management more efficient. This type of solution is just as useful for small to medium sized businesses as it is for larger ones. There are many ways in which it can be utilized so that each company can get the most out of it by targeting its use towards their specific goals. Let's look at five ways in which this technology can be used:

Consolidation of Servers
IT departments used to have just one option when it came to infrastructure. Each department would house, and manage, their own applications. This made for underutilized servers and the added expense that comes with having unused equipment. With a virtualized environment, our companies can reduce the number of servers by consolidating the existing ones, and we'll cut down on our operational costs, as well. The migration process is significantly faster and also reduces our rack and server storage space. Fewer staff members are needed to manage this technology, so they can focus on other projects.

Expand or Refresh an Already Virtualized Environment
Online service providers can benefit from integrated infrastructure since they need to maximize their service-delivery while remaining available at all times, reliable and efficient. We can free up the time of our IT staff so that they can work other tasks that can't be done through this system.

Make a Virtualized IT Infrastructure for Outside Offices
Not all of us house our business in one location, so it's important that our team members who work remotely or from other branches can benefit from the same resources, without having duplicate servers and IT staff to manage the technology. We can have a central remote management that's easy to use, efficient, scalable and flexible so that we don't need to spend money on hiring or retraining staff.

Support Application Hosting Platforms
Virtualized integrated infrastructure provides as way in which applications can be introduced without disrupting anything, or to host important applications apart form the main IT infrastructure. It's created to be reliable and capable and allows employees to focus on their most critical projects without having to wait for a new infrastructure to be built.

Create Private Clouds
Our IT staff can have the IT assets almost instantly with private cloud platforms which allow our organizations to be more efficient and agile. We live in a fast-paced world, so there's no time for IT members to wait for asset requests to be honored. They need to have on-demand access so that our workplaces can remain productive.

No matter what size company we run, we can all make use of this new technology to help our businesses run more smoothly, have more impact on the world and be more productive. In the end, it also saves time and money, two resources which we can use in other ways to make our business more successful.

I work with Dell, to find out more about virtualization see here