Across South Africa, businesses are rethinking their virtualisation strategies. Rising licensing costs, tightening budgets, and inflexible commercial models are forcing IT leaders to ask a tough question: Are we still getting value from our current virtualisation platform?
By Ed Hoppitt, EMEA director: business value practice at Red Hat
For many, the answer is increasingly “no.” We’re seeing a real shift, and in some rare cases, organisations are even choosing to de-virtualise certain workloads, moving them back onto physical infrastructure to regain control over performance and cost. That’s a clear signal: when managing your virtual environment becomes more complex than the problems it was supposed to solve, it’s time for a change.
Reimagining virtualisation for flexibility and future growth
Virtualisation should empower you, not box you in. In fact, 31% of organisations cite licensing costs and another 31% cite management complexity as top concerns with their current platform.
Yet too often, companies find themselves stuck with opaque licensing models, bloated tooling, and infrastructure that’s difficult to scale or integrate with modern workloads. Modern IT teams need more than just hypervisors, they need platforms that help them manage, migrate, and optimise at scale, and which natively understand modern workloads – the growing part of most estates.
That means intuitive interfaces, policy-driven automation, and open standards that let you build a future-ready architecture that provides choice and flexibility. Less click-ops and more API-driven, declarative operations. It’s no surprise then that 38% of organisations now prioritise automation and AI capabilities when choosing a new virtualisation platform.
This isn’t just about saving money. It’s about unlocking agility and making virtualisation work harder for the business. Increasingly, we’re seeing customers choose a modern platform to make that happen.
Tackling complexity: keep it simple, keep it scalable
Multi-cloud environments are now the norm. But more environments often mean more risk, more tools, and more siloes – unless you’ve got the right management layer.
That’s where modern, open virtualisation platforms come in. Eighty-five percent of organisations are using hybrid cloud, and 72% are using multiple cloud providers.
The smartest organisations are using tools that:
- Give full visibility into performance across virtual and hybrid environments
- Help avoid VM sprawl through intelligent templating and lifecycle controls
- Automate backup, restore, and policy enforcement without compromising performance
- Enforce granular access controls to improve security and governance
This is about bringing the platform engineering discipline of the cloud-native world to traditional virtualisation. Keeping environments clean, efficient, and aligned to your business priorities.
Choice matters: Open versus Proprietary
When evaluating your next virtualisation platform, one key question stands out: How much control do you want over your future? Open source platforms offer transparency, interoperability, and community-driven innovation, all essential for organisations that want to future-proof their infrastructure.
Seventy percent of organisations have recently moved or are currently moving part of their VM workloads to a new or additional hypervisor. And 43% say they are very or extremely likely to switch to a different hypervisor in the next three years.
Migration is no longer the blocker it once was. With the right automation and compatibility tooling, organisations can move workloads at scale with minimal disruption. Many are using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and configuration-as-code (CaC) practices to ensure operations remain consistent and repeatable across environments.
Virtualisation is evolving, so should your strategy
Virtualisation remains a critical foundation for modern IT – but only if it evolves with your needs. That means open platforms and tools that help you manage complexity.
For South African organisations under pressure to deliver more with less, now is the time to rethink virtualisation – a strategic capability to modernise.
Because the question isn’t whether to virtualise. It’s how to do it better.