Survey Reveals Virtualisation Gaining Momentum in the Manufacturing Sector

Recently we conducted a survey revealing that virtualisation is gradually making the transition from the IT world to the shop floor.  

The statistics were gathered during our recent road show, ‘Availability Virtualisation in Automation’,  where the views of over 100 systems integrators and end users were analysed and compared. 

The research demonstrated that virtualisation is now becoming more prevalent, with 85% of end users respondents saying they now utilise virtualisation technology to some extent in their organisation. However, although the bulk of virtualisation deployments remain limited solely to IT departments (38%), 18% of those companies questioned said they use it in their engineering and automation IT, whilst an encouraging 29% now use virtualisation across both areas.

The demand for increased availability emerged as the key driver for end users considering virtualisation (35%), whilst both end users and systems integrators recognised external threats at the biggest risk to their security.  The end user respondents admitted that their current security measures were limited to use of passwords (46%) and the use of anti-virus software (42%).

Rob Dinsmore, our Product Manager for Availability commented: “There has been a tendency in recent years for automation IT to take its lead from traditional IT and many of the trends we’re seeing in manufacturing began on the office floor.

“As we can see from these figures, virtualisation is slowly beginning to transfer to the factory floor, but we need to embrace these technologies more to optimise our capabilities in automation and engineering.   When questioned, only 12% of systems integrators had achieved a 50% level of adoption within their customer base, so there is still progress to be made.

“Virtualisation has much to offer the industrial world and the benefits to companies can be significant. For example, with virtualisation, we can take traditional hardware such as servers and reduce the number of actual machines needed, by converting most of them to virtual machines.

“The advantages of virtualisation include less downtime, reduced maintenance and energy costs due to fewer hardware components and improved resilience against malfunctions.”

The road show was held at locations across England and Ireland and welcomed delegates from some of the country’s biggest names in industry.