An increasing number of companies have put virtualisation in place as they look to cut costs associated with physical hardware and other factors.

Research firm Aberdeen found that around 50 per cent of organisations had adopted virtualisation within their IT infrastructures in order to support business continuity in the event of unforeseen circumstances.

In fact, out of the 320 companies polled, more than three-quarters (77 per cent) have either implemented some form of virtualisation, or plan to do so in the future.

The protection of these virtualised systems should now be a priority for these firms, Ralph Rodriguez of Aberdeen argued.

"Virtualisation has been swiftly adopted by end users, particularly in the server realm and largely due to the business pressures to consolidate the number of servers occupying precious real estate space.

"The next step for most of these virtualisation adopters is to think about how to protect these newly virtualised environments with disaster recovery, high availability, and business continuity plans."

Separately, a study from Lighthouse Research found that the implementation of virtualisation in enterprise data was being hampered by management inefficiency. It suggested that firms need to develop a "comprehensive strategy" to deal with this.

Research for Connect in 2007 found that 88 per cent of UK businesses were interested in Disaster Recovery systems primarily to protect their critical applications and data