What is Service Virtualization?

Companies always aim for teams to develop, test, and operate harmoniously to deliver high quality applications that are on schedule, within the budget, and error free. This can be done with service virtualization where you minimise your physical infrastructure and reduce your IT overheads by virtualizing your whole IT Department, or sections of it.

In this article, we’ll be introducing what service virtualization is and how this type of IT services is beneficial for your company and how it can be managed by service providers.

Service virtualization is the process of mimicking or simulating component behaviors that are unavailable or difficult to access while testing. Some of these components are devices, databases, APIs, networks, and more. There are a multitude of reasons why resources are difficult to access, such as – components may still be being developed, undergoing maintenance, difficult to set up, owned by third parties, costly, or restricted.

With the help of service virtualization, testers will no longer be dependent on assets, or be blocked by other teams which will allow you to conduct continuous integrated testing at any point of your software development.

There are different types of services virtualization:

  1. SERVER VIRTUALIZATION SERVICES

This service will consolidate your servers, free up your resources, improve flexibility, and potentially reduce costs.

  1. DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION

By helping you free up your IT department’s time, this will reduce the required desktop support and resource-intensive software roll-outs. Desktop virtualisation is a thin client architecture that allows users’ applications and even their operating system to run from a centralised server.

  1. APPLICATION VIRTUALIZATION

Application virtualization frees you from your operating system. This means improved mobility, increased reliability and probable cost reduction. If you are part of a larger organisation, you know the headache of tracking software licenses, rolling out new operating systems, making applications mobile and the constant bother of application conflicts. Application virtualisation simplifies your application management, making all of this easy.

Just like all other managed IT services, service virtualization delivers and gets results. A study back in 2017 showed that companies with more than 500 employees that are using service virtualization achieved cheaper, faster, and greater software quality. Additionally, they found out that:

  • More than a quarter of the organizations doubled their test execution rates.
  • More than a third cut their test cycles in half.
  • Almost half saw a 40 percent reduction in defects.

As you cut on costs, time to market, and dependencies, you will be able to increase your business value. All of these can be accomplished with service virtualization. If you are interested to know more details about service virtualization, an IT service provider in Australia, CMSIT, can help you understand it and help you plan. Aside from service virtualization, we also offer other IT services that can benefit your company. For more information, you may contact us via our Contact Us page.