Small businesses are not taking the most basic steps to secure and protect their virtual environments, despite having a strong interest in virtualisation, according to a new survey by Symantec.
The 2011 Small Business Virtualization Poll, which included 658 respondents in 28 countries in North America, EMEA, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, revealed that 70% of organisations are considering virtualisation.
Symantec senior vice president of Strategy and Marketing Steve Cullen said they’re still early in the adoption cycle, but virtualisation enables small businesses to reduce expenses and meet the increasing demands for greater productivity and efficiency.
Seventy per cent of respondents cited reduced capital expense, and 68% said reduced operating expense would drive their decisions to deploy virtualisation, while 67% said ability to use fewer servers and 65% said improved server scalability would push adoption of virtualisation.
The poll found that only 10% of respondents have deployed virtualised servers and they are focusing their early-stage efforts on simpler, less critical application areas.
Sixty per cent of respondents feel performance as the driver to deploy virtualisation, while 56% each believe backup and security and patch management as factors for the adoption.
Lack of experience was indicated by nearly a third of small businesses as a factor for not planning virtualisation.
The survey also found that only 15% always back up their virtualised servers, while 23% backup infrequently or not at all.
Depicting a sorry scene in terms of securing virtualised environment, the poll found that a 78% of small businesses do not have antivirus on their virtual servers, 48% do not have a firewall, and 74% forego endpoint protection.
To secure their data in virtualised environment, Symantec suggested small businesses can work with an IT consultant to develop a strategy, consider security solutions needed to secure virtual environment, and can have a simplified approach to backup.
