If you spend any time eavesdropping on your CIO’s conversations these days, you’re likely to hear him or her talk about “virtualization.”
As technology goes, virtualization is a nifty idea: software programs out on the Internet somewhere serving the same function as hardware typically housed in your company’s data center. It travels under multiple names—cloud computing, software-as-a-service, or utility computing, to name a few—but essentially the idea is to cut costs and improve data management by letting a vendor handle the maintenance.
