MSPNetworks Blog

A digital twin could arguably be seen as a somewhat niche technological innovation. Regardless, they are an invaluable resource to quite a few industries that help the businesses that use them optimize their processes. Let’s go over what a digital twin is, and how it helps a few different business types meet their needs.

Hardware is expensive, this much is certain. When a small or medium-sized business is looking to get the most bang for buck from their technology investments, they have to consider hardware to be the most crucial part of the equation. One option that businesses can take advantage of today is to use virtualized environments. Whether these computing environments are hosted onsite or in the cloud, a business can extend the usefulness of their IT budget by utilizing them. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of virtualization on your business.

Business Computing is Shifting

There was a time, not too long ago, where there weren’t a lot of options when it came to business computing. The small business that wanted to expand its computing infrastructure would buy a server and use it for a dedicated purpose. This strategy gives the business the most control over their hardware, data, and applications, so for the business that has an onsite IT support team, it’s logical. 

It’s also very expensive. 

One of the main problems with this organizational computing strategy is that it doesn’t utilize the capacity of these servers. The servers are used for a specific purpose and that can leave a significant amount of resources unused. This underutilization is a wasted opportunity. By using virtualized environments, new hardware can be more effectively utilized, and therefore, can help control hardware costs. 

Here’s How Virtualization Works

Instead of running one server for every mission-critical application, you run several virtual machines on one server. Each virtual machine only uses the hardware resources that it needs, meaning that three or four servers can be consolidated into one. You will get the same performance out of one server with many virtual servers on it as you would get from multiple in-house servers. 

Pros of Virtualization

Outside of the admittedly hefty upfront cost of virtualization, the reduction in hardware costs you see down the road make the strategy a sound one for almost any business. Not only do you save money on buying servers, the environments are accessible from nearly any device. This means that you cut down on your workstation spend, and you can take full advantage of remote workers. All-in-all, businesses that commit to virtualization can save between 40-to-60 percent on their organizational hardware costs, and see reduced management, utility, and maintenance costs as well.

This also allows you to spend more time driving your business forward and less time managing it. Virtual servers can deploy new environments in minutes, expediting the process by a substantial amount. Virtualization also makes security and data redundancy much easier as your IT admins only need to work on one server rather than several, and back up one piece of hardware.

Your Company in the Cloud

Another consideration is hosting your virtual environments in a bigger virtual environment. Cloud computing is more affordable and secure than ever and companies have been paying attention. By using cloud offerings to extend the benefits of virtualization you’re effectively paying to host your company’s servers in the cloud. This can be even more cost effective than using virtualization on your own in-house servers, but it does remove some of the control you and your team have over your hardware. 

Either way, if you aren’t considering virtualization, you are probably wasting money. If you would like to learn more about virtualization for your business, contact the IT professionals at MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001 today.

Businesses are using more data than ever. Unfortunately, the data is usually spread out over different systems. Typically, this would make managing this data extraordinarily difficult, but with virtualization, the modern business that wants to use its data, can, efficiently. 

What is Data Virtualization?

With so much data spread around in different data warehouses, data lakes, and the like, organizations may run into a significant amount of errors--and, inefficiency--due to the constant shuffling around of the data. Virtualization makes it possible for an application to get and change data without having all the technical details about it.

Virtualization takes place in real time and makes it easier for any data to be put to use, allowing the various solutions that are used throughout the course of business to interact with this data.

The Primary Benefits of Data Virtualization

The benefits of data virtualization for your business extend to the fact that every piece of data that your organization has--regardless of where it is stored--is retrievable and usable. This ability to access all virtualized material gives your business the ability to decipher context in data across platforms. This provides an organization ways to deliver information faster, cut data-associated costs, and provides insulation from users altering records.

These benefits make data virtualization an outstanding strategy for businesses that want to leverage their data through a Big Data platform either using business intelligence or business analytics strategies.

Additionally, data virtualization helps build higher outputs by integrating different data units and structures and simplifying data management, as organizations won’t have to spend time altering data to work with dissimilar file types. 

Interested in Learning More about Data Virtualization?

If you would like to learn more about data virtualization, reach out to the IT experts at MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001. 

On a Windows machine, look at your taskbar, near the Start button and the search function. The next little icon, the one that almost looks like a bit of film, is the Task View button, the button that (among other purposes) allows you to create and manage virtual desktops. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss how to use this handy feature, starting with why you might want to.

What is a Virtual Desktop?

To be completely clear, this blog is referring to a very specific type of virtual desktop, which is important to state right off the bat.

Oftentimes, when we refer to “virtual desktops,” we are talking about a computing environment that is hosted in the cloud, which can be accessed from almost any device, from anywhere. Think of it like a Voice over IP (VoIP) solution, but instead of just your phone, it’s the whole computer.

Here, we’re talking about a slightly different version of that concept. Windows 10 allows its users to have multiple instances, or sessions, of Windows 10 running at the same time, via the built-in Virtual Desktop function. This has many potential uses in a business, most notably, aiding in organization while keeping different tasks and their accompanying resources separated from your other tasks and their resources. Listen to music on a streaming service while at work? Free up some valuable desktop space by accessing the service in a secondary, virtual one. Or maybe you’re a compulsive email checker - knowing that you have it open in another desktop may be enough to keep you from becoming tempted. It really is up to you to figure out how they are most useful to you.

In fairness, it really would be more accurate to call this feature “Virtual Monitor,” because it works more like adding an additional monitor setup than virtualizing a desktop... but we aren’t in charge of that kind of thing.

Working with Windows 10’s Virtual Desktops

Click on the Task View button. If your Task View button is missing, right-clicking the taskbar and selecting Show Task View button will fix that.

Alternatively, you can also open Task View by pressing Windows Key + Tab. 

This will bring you to the Task View. On the bottom right, there will be a New Desktop button, which you can click to create a new, virtual desktop in addition to your original desktop. There are a few easy ways to switch back and forth between them - you can select the desktop to view from the Task View screen, use a four-fingered swiping gesture on certain touchpads and touchscreens, or a keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Windows Key + Left/Right Arrow.

To use your programs and applications in your virtual desktops, open them as you normally would. While many apps will allow an instance in each desktop, others will pull you to the desktop that has the application running. Closing one of your virtual desktops will also cause any apps open in it to jump as well.

How do you anticipate using these virtualized desktops in your day-to-day, if at all? Let us know in the comments!

A big part of running a successful operation is knowing how to make the most of your resources, minimizing your operating costs while still generating optimal sources of revenue and other income. One way to do so is by making the most of the hardware you currently have - such as your servers.

Let’s discuss how you can get more out of your existing servers via a process called virtualization.

Virtualization in a Nutshell

Virtualization is the use of something called virtual machines in your operations. A virtual machine is effectively what it sounds like: one of the machines that your business uses, like a computer or server, but instead of being a physical one, it’s hosted in a virtual environment.

Every computer can contribute the following resources: processing power, memory, storage space, and its networking capabilities. However, depending on the task that a given device is used for, many of these resources could potentially be put to waste, especially on a server.

If you have a line-of-business app running on your server, and you want to add another application to your network, the vendor might suggest buying a single server just to host it. There are cases where that might need to be the case, but it’s pretty likely that your current server has resources that aren’t being fully utilized for the first line-of-business app. By deploying a virtual machine on the server, it will run as if you have two servers - one for each app, but utilizing the same hardware.

What Are Some of the Benefits of Using Virtualization?

Well, the most obvious one should be the fact that, by allowing you to make the most of the computing resources you already have, you can save a hefty bit of cash on the equipment that you wouldn’t need to buy in order to support your operations.

Of course, leveraging virtualization can help you reduce some of your other costs, as well as simplify a few of the responsibilities your team members will have. Fewer servers means that there is less to power (easing your energy bills) and less to manage (allowing your time to be utilized in other ways).

However, virtualization can also assist you with your business continuity. If your onsite infrastructure is struck with a hardware failure, you can easily replicate your virtualized environment to a fresh infrastructure and resume where you left off. For similar reasons, migrating data becomes a lot easier as well.

To learn more about how you can benefit from virtualizing your business, give our professionals a call at (516) 403-9001.