Not only are your servers loud, they take up a lot of space and energy. And more likely than not, they’re not configured in the most efficient way possible.

As businesses increasingly look for new ways to save money, server virtualization—the process by which a virtual server farm, rather than a material one, is created—becomes an attractive option. Rather than continuing to invest in more machines, businesses are learning that virtualization allows them to grow while consolidating their equipment needs.

If you’re a business owner who’s not the most technology-adept person, enlisting the services of an IT consulting business will provide you with the peace of mind required when making changes to your company’s technological backbone. IT consulting professionals are able to help provide a seamless transition to virtualization, guaranteeing that a company experiences as little downtime as possible when it makes the shift and adopts new technology.

Virtualization enables business owners to enjoy a slew of benefits from saving money and energy to providing better equipment and technology. Here’s a look at the top five benefits:

1. Saving money: Consolidating your servers means that less energy is spent powering them, cooling them and storing them. Just think of the savings during the summer months, in particular.
2. Disaster recovery: Having less machines means having less machines that need to be replicated at a disaster recovery site. Not only do you curtail your disaster recovery costs, but you simplify the entire process as well.
3. Increased uptime: Advanced features available on many virtualization platforms allow machines to bounce back quickly from unplanned outages.
4. Increased security: Features such as roll-back allow machines to be set back to a certain point in time should something in the system be amiss. Virtualization also provides limited direct access to hardware because of isolation.
5. The cloud: Virtualization is a step toward the cloud, as you’re getting rid of some of the unnecessary hardware on which you’ve relied in the past. And with the cloud offering countless benefits from heightened security to enhanced efficiencies to promising cost savings, it is exactly where you want to take your business.