The study, which canvassed the opinion of 200 IT professionals, found that those in retail, distribution and transport were most likely to virtualise both server and storage with a difference of 6%, enabling their business to be future ready. This is compared to those in manufacturing where the gap was over 40%.

Efficiency and productivity are key drivers in this year's IT departments for 76% of respondents. On average 58% of IT decision makers said that they anticipated dealing with budget cuts with 91% of those working in the public sector.

Jeremy Wallis, Systems Engineering Director, NetApp said: "As IT departments respond to pressure to do more with less, we will see an increase in virtualisation projects. The drive for efficiency is clearly relentless for many IT decision makers, however it is surprising that storage virtualisation seems to be being overlooked for one in five respondents. This is perhaps an opportunity for end users and also the channel, as resellers and systems integrators can support those looking to achieve greater efficiencies without compromising on performance or business agility."

United Biscuits, the manufacturer of brands such as Hula Hoops and McCoys crisps is a business built on NetApp. It faced exactly this challenge. Steve Summersgill, Technical Services Manager, United Biscuits said, "We needed a storage solution that would support an increasingly virtualised environment and provide simultaneous backup and instant failover. NetApp offered a solution that could integrate into our current SAN environment providing additional flexible infrastructure storage."