According to a recent SpiceWorks report, three-quarters of businesses surveyed already use virtual machines. But for those yet to make the leap, what are the virtualization issues to look out for? And as all IT pros know, the landscape is constantly shifting and new solutions come up all the time. As IT infrastructure becomes increasingly divided among physical, virtual and cloud solutions, how can IT managers ensure their systems are working optimally and data is protected across multiple platforms?

As more companies invest in virtual machines, IT pros are presented with the need to integrate these virtualization environments into the data protection plan. The trouble is that while the data is usually backed up, often the hypervisor configuration is forgotten.

If new EU data protection legislation becomes law as expected, companies that do business in Europe will soon need to recruit for a new senior-level IT job: Data Protection Officer.

Automate, automate, automate. According to Forrester Research (The State of Business Technology Resiliency, Q2 2014), “The complexity we face today in technology is beyond what humans can manage”.