Virtualization is spreading through the enterprise for a variety of mission-critical workloads. According to statistics from an August 2012 blog post on eginnovations.com, 59 percent of workloads are being virtualized. As we move forward into 2013, we need to decide how we will proceed with virtualization in order to remain effective and efficient.

Virtualization Maturity Assessments Increase
As many organizations ready themselves to make the transition to cloud, they find that they are not prepared to meet the demands of virtualization infrastructure. As a result of this discovery, they will begin assessing the current state of their IT, make firm decisions regarding where their IT plan should be and begin to implement their plans for the year around virtualization.

Increased Adoption of Virtualization Management Best Practices
Many will begin implementing or improving their virtualization management practices after the organization's technical analysis is complete. As evidenced in the statistic by eginnovations.com, more workloads are being done on virtual platforms. Management best practices are vital to the success of these and adoption will increase to over 30 percent.

Converged Infrastructure Approach
Independent research firm, Wikibon, forecasted that by 2017, two-thirds of IT infrastructure would be delivered through converged offerings. In order to minimize the complexity involved when transitioning to virtualization management from current management tools and multiple server pools, customers will adopt a converged infrastructure approach.

Private and Hybrid Cloud Are Top of Mind
As knowledge of public cloud outages spread, more firms will be open to building their own private Infrastructure-as-a-Service products. This makes the need for organizational IT assessments and management best practice adoption crucial for businesses.

Virtualization is the foundation for what IT needs to do to help businesses stay competitive. The increased acceptance of virtualization technologies will help IT move from the rigid, expensive architectures of the past to the shared, service-oriented infrastructure of the future that gives more value to business and their customers.