Business is becoming increasingly technological. With the rise in computer dependence however, comes a plethora of risks - risks that firms are willing to spend money to avoid.
The primary concern among business owners that rely heavily on a bank of machines will be the potential loss of data. If a server crashes and information integral to the company's progression - or even survival - is either lost or temporarily unavailable, productivity could be significantly impacted.
CNN Money recently ran an article entitled 'Control the cloud: Frustrated with off-site data hosting? Try virtualization', which took a look at a firm which has been involved with alternatives to hardware storage.
HotSchedules is an online-software company which for a long while was involved in cloud computing – a popular alternative to regular forms of data stores.
The company will have benefitted from appearing on the hallowed pages of CNN Money and the associated online PR perks that such an inclusion brings.
Furthermore, with a link included in the story, the increase in click-throughs from the article page could have led to a rise in the number of people visiting their website. Business interest could have grown as a result.
For a while, the Austin-based company dealt in cloud computing, paying a monthly fee to a computer storage company for space and computing power on an as-needed basis.
However, after incidents including HotSchedules employees not being allowed on the off-site facility's premises and poor customer relations, the firm moved out of cloud computing and into virtualization.
Virtualization splits by turning one physical server into a number of independent, fully-functioning servers. While this single physical computer typically costs more than cloud computing, the security risks are deemed to be lower.
Virtualization is viewed by many to be an "internal" or "private" cloud, and is rapidly gaining notoriety in the US.
And it has done a great deal for HotSchedules, with chief executive Ray Pawlikowski saying: "Once we virtualized, we were able to stabilize our monthly expenses."
Indeed, the firm pays approximately $12,000 per month in energy bills. However, Pawlikowski estimates that this figure would have doubled if the business had added hardware to its data center.
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