Identify Virtualization Sales Opportunities

By Jay McCall, networking & managed services editor, Business Solutions magazine

If you're backing up your customers' data to the cloud, bandwidth limitations may make a full restore difficult at best. One way to counter this problem is by creating a virtual environment for your customers whereby their normal computing resources (e.g. operating systems, applications, hardware partitioning, and machine simulation) are emulated on a server at an off-site data center. This is accomplished through virtualization applications from vendors such as Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware. By creating a virtualization environment for your customers, they can actually run their business activities from the cloud rather than having to pull down all their backed up resources onto a local physical machine, which could take days. Not all your customers are candidates for virtualization environments. To help discern which ones are potential candidates and to help answer other questions about this topic, I spoke with Justin Crotty, Sr. VP and GM at NetEnrich, a remote IT infrastructure management company.