Aaron Baldwin
Information Technology Department
George Mason University

Typical corporate infrastructure may have hundreds of computer desktops requiring maintenance. Depending on the scale of the business, these desktops can potentially be scattered from hundreds to thousands of miles apart. Traditionally being managed through remote access, these desktops will require an endless man hours to individually keep each and every system up to par. Simple tasks such as patch work or updates could easily result in days or weeks of maintenance. Along with the financial impact, these requirements are the epitome of inefficiency. If instead an organization uses virtualization, they would have centralized management of all their desktops. Rather than requiring individual maintenance, they could be maintained as a whole. This technology has come to be known more commonly as "cloud" computing. Taking measures even further, virtualization combats the same issues of idle time power consumption that plagued traditional servers.