Many organizations are hitting a brick wall when it comes to fully deploying virtualization in their environments.  According to a recent survey, businesses are still unsure about the ability to back up and recover their virtual machines, causing many organizations to avoid virtualizing their entire infrastructure and hitting the phenomenon which has become known as "VM stall."

An organization reaches VM stall when they hit a point in their virtualization journey where they just can't seem to get beyond a certain percentage virtualized.  The average stall point seems to be somewhere around 40%, and this can be caused by a number of factors.  However, one thing does seem to be common across most organizations falling into this trap: A VM stall will typically occur when a company no longer feels comfortable virtualizing.  And this wariness usually causes a virtualization deployment to get stifled before reaching mission- or enterprise-critical applications, leaving a virtual environment made up of more or less "low-hanging fruit" applications.

Backup and recovery software provider Veeam recently finished up a survey of around 500 CIOs from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France.  The survey looked to identify the impact of virtualization on data protection strategies.  And what it found was that enterprise adoption of virtualization is actually being hampered due to fears around the ability to successfully back up and recover virtual machines. 

The findings highlight how virtualization should move from being viewed as a risk to an enabler of improved data protection within the enterprise.  But first, enterprises must consider changing or augmenting their current management and data protection processes in order to take full advantage of virtualization technology.

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Read more of this article at InfoWorld's Virtualization Report.