Improve Disaster Recovery EffortsDisaster recovery (or DR) revolves around being able to reinstate things to a state of normalcy after a disaster. As you can imagine, backing up a fully virtualized infrastructure by making copies of VM files images is a far easier process than trying to do the same with disparate hardware servers.Moreover, it takes just a fraction of the original hardware equipment to host an entire infrastructure using virtualization. What this means for cash-strapped small and mid-sized business is that you could afford to buy a small number of servers to be housed at an alternative location. In the event of a disaster, these servers could then be relocated as necessary, loaded with the latest VMs and put into action faster than the lead times offered by most IT vendors.Obviously, the fact that even the largest SMB's IT infrastructure can be contained within a few hard disk drives does have far-reaching implications on the security front. For one, the risk of having a rogue employee walk off with the entire company's VMs is a very real threat that does not exist with physical servers. And as with all backup tasks, there is always the risk of VMs being missed as a result of human error.