Over the last 30 years, the landscape of the IT industry has changed dramatically with the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing. Though this trend has become mainstream, implementation has varied among world markets. 

The following is a guest post by Reese Jones.

The Cloud is an incredible step forward in data management and the age-old routine of backing up and syncing your files with your colleagues. Being able to commit code to a centralised place or uploading a new set of GUI elements, knowing that in minutes they'll sit on your programmer's computer ready to be implemented makes for a far more slick development process. But if you're a development team who hasn't yet dipped into the potential of cloud computing, then you're missing out.

According to ZDNet, “A true converged infrastructure is one that is not only pretested and preconfigured but also and more importantly pre-integrated; in other words it ships out as a single SKU and product to the customer.” Because the infrastructure is coming to you as a complete unit, you only need to contact the purchase vendor for support, rather than the manufacturers of the individual components, simplifying the support process.

A recent study conducted by KPMG found that 81% of businesses were either evaluating cloud services, planned a cloud implementation or had already implemented a cloud strategy. Fewer than one in 10 said they had no immediate plans to start using the cloud. No matter how businesses decide to move to the cloud, one thing's clear: they are moving to the cloud.

In the many meetings that we have at customer sites, conferences, seminars, and other industry events, one conversation point that we continually come into is the difference between Cloud Computing and Virtualization. The “cloud” has become a term shrouded in confusion.  Many IT organizations position themselves to be “doing cloud” to satisfy the questions from the business and other executives, because they believe virtualization to be synonymous. While virtualization is an integral part of cloud computing, they are not the same thing.