Guest post by Jean Atelsek, S&P Global Market Intelligence
This blog is the first in our series on the benefits and trends of virtualization, and a companion to the 451 Research Business Impact Brief “The virtues of virtualization.”
As discussed in “The virtues of virtualization ,” the chameleon-like ability of virtual machines (VMs) – instances of an operating system that can be colocated on a single physical machine via a hypervisor – to adapt to any IT environment has proven to be a superpower in modern IT. Few enterprises have homogenous environments; most IT estates contain a mix of public and private cloud resources that have been deployed over a span of years and persisted through multiple generations of server, storage and networking architecture. These diverse elements need to be connected and managed in the most holistic, efficient way possible.
The pervasiveness of virtualization comes through in data showing that organizations run VMs throughout their IT estates. According to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Native, Server Virtualization/Hypervisor Strategy 2024 survey, companies deploy VMs chiefly in private cloud (47%), public cloud (45%), legacy on-prem environments (39%) and hybrid cloud (39%). Further down the list are hosted private cloud (33%) and bare metal (21%).
In fact, companies often run containers – lightweight software packages that bundle an application and its dependencies into a full runtime environment – in or on VMs to tap the cost, performance and security benefits of virtualized infrastructure. Containers don’t need a hypervisor to run applications, but the benefits of virtualization provide a strong incentive for having them in a VM-based environment. For one thing, because each has its own operating system and kernel, VMs are ideal for scenarios where applications with different underlying operating systems need to share the same hardware; for the same reason, any security threat to one machine is not likely to affect others. And unlike containers, VMs give developers the flexibility to directly emulate different hardware environments for software testing and quality assurance.
The adaptability of VMs to diverse environments also helps companies keep pace with continual and incremental changes in hardware and software design. To stay competitive, businesses must adopt new architectures and sometimes shift technology paradigms – the advent of virtualization was one such shift; the launch of web applications, pay-as-you-go cloud resources and, most recently, AI workflows tapping into the power of large languages models followed. Because virtualization abstracts away the underlying hardware and lets operations teams use a consistent set of management tools, VMs make these transitions less disruptive.
Resilience in a heterogeneous environment isn’t just about technology – it’s about aligning the needs of every stakeholder, from IT operators safeguarding uptime to business leaders protecting customer trust. In most enterprises, refreshing servers, storage, and networks can’t mean starting over; mission-critical workloads must remain uninterrupted because they carry the organization’s very identity. Virtualization creates a unified path forward, allowing teams to replicate and test applications on modern infrastructure while keeping essential services running, enabling a seamless transition to more efficient hardware. That same continuity extends to software, ensuring that legacy applications (which are often tied to older operating systems) can operate reliably alongside the latest tools, meeting the resilience requirements of both operational and innovation-driven teams.
Looking ahead: we will discuss Virtualization Virtue #2: Stronger cloud security and fault tolerance.
About the Author:
Jean Atelsek is a senior research analyst working across the Cloud & Managed Services Transformation channel and digital economics unit of 451 Research, a technology research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence. She covers vendors and technologies that manage or optimize public and private cloud total cost of operations, performance or consumption. This includes FinOps products, platforms and providers that help organizations forecast, analyze and optimize cloud spending based on data collected from the IT environment. In the cloud-native universe, Jean focuses on container-native software and platforms, serverless architectures, service mesh, and the converging worlds of observability, runtime policy enforcement and application networking. She also covers technology accelerators for application modernization, including the application of natural language processing and generative AI to effect code translation.
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