Business needs to invest more in research and planning, said Craig Searle, technical team leader at Sift, an Australian consulting company.

"There is a bit of hype surrounding virtualization, especially in terms of it being a silver-bullet solution," Searle said.

"But not enough planning is going into enterprise-wide virtualization, particularly in security and management of a virtualized environment."

Today, most organizations are using server virtualization to increase efficiency and utilization and to reduce data center costs. There is also a lot of interest in using virtualization to support multiple operating systems.

However, uptake is still slow when it comes to using the technology to support a shift to utility computing.