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Virtualization and the Small Business Owner (2026 Edition)

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Illustration of a central server connected to multiple devices (laptop, desktop, tablet) with cloud icons, symbolizing virtualization and hybrid cloud integration for small businesses.

How Small Businesses Can Use Virtualization in 2026

Virtualization has moved from “promising” to practical and pervasive. In 2009, running six servers on 8 GB of RAM felt remarkable. Today, consolidation, hybrid cloud, containerization, and Desktop‑as‑a‑Service (DaaS) make modern small‑business IT more scalable, secure, and cost‑aware than ever. This guide shows how to choose—and succeed with—the right mix of virtual machines (VMs), containers, and cloud desktops for your business.

1) What “Virtualization” Means Today

Virtual machines (VMs) still anchor most business workloads. A hypervisor (like Hyper‑V, KVM, or VMware by Broadcom’s vSphere) runs multiple guest operating systems on one physical host, isolating workloads while boosting utilization. Linux’s KVM is built into the kernel, delivering near‑native performance for many workloads and supporting both x86 and Arm hosts. [kernel.org]

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Data Encryption Tools For The Mobile Business Executive

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Infographic depicting various devices using data encryption.

Data encryption is not one of the security options most companies think of providing for their senior executives who use, and travel, with laptops, netbooks and tablets so they can stay productive even when on the road. This is even more true of corporate executives who sometimes demand anytime, anywhere access to data residing on corporate servers.

While the big corporations can afford to spend millions of dollars on data protection hardware and software., the same cannot be said of executives in small and medium-sized organizations, especially when it comes to loss of personal information, including credit card data, patient records or other financial information, stored by the company.

Data breaches happen and information is lost every day due to small mistakes that could have been avoided by using data encryption technologies. For small businesses, these data loss events can be devastating.

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How To Fix “Checking Battery State” Error

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We recently ran into a “checking battery state” error on a Zorin Linux v7 installation where the system just hung for a long time at the “checking battery state” stage when starting up. Zorin Linux is a very easy to use operating system, especially for those making the transition from a Windows environment. As it turned out, this wierd error was quite easy to rectify.

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How To Fix CentOS 6.4 Boot Hang After Upgrade

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The Community Enterprise Operating System, commonly known as CentOS is a solid Linux Operating system similar to Red Hat Linux. We recently ran into a GUI boot problem after upgrading to CentOS 6.4 in a VirtualBox environment. Upon restarting after the upgrade, we noticed that during the boot process, the system showed either a blank screen or the CentOS progress bar for an extended period, almost one hour.

Apparently, the CentOS 6.4 upgrade broke X11 (the UNIX/Linux Graphical User Interface  or GUI). A few attempts at repairing the boot loader using the CentOS 6.4 installation disc did not help.

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Mobile App Permissions: Are Users Really the Problem?

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While there have been a lot of news-worthy events in the past couple of years involving corporate breaches, one thing has not changed. Users are still considered the greatest obstacle to information security. Whether it is phishing, opening infected attachments, or “just being stupid and lazy”.

Our focus in this article will be on the “stupid and lazy” part of this equation. We will take a quick look at the way users tackle mobile app permissions in the android market place otherwise known as Google Play. A cursory look at some apps on Google Play and the permissions required by these apps, and the ratings given by users, even to apps with seemingly over-reaching or meaningless permissions, explains a lot about why security will continue to be a problem for a very long time.

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