Government agencies need to overcome funding uncertainties and other major barriers in order to realize savings from virtualizing their servers and desktops, according to a new study by MeriTalk. The report, “Virtualization Vacuum: The 2012 Government Virtualization Study,” surveyed government IT decision makers. One of the key findings is that 82 percent of federal and 77 percent of state and local IT professionals say their agencies have already implemented some server virtualization at an estimated savings of 19 percent of their IT budgets, which translates to $15 billion across government.

The report also found that virtualized workloads are expected to nearly double by 2015, from 37 percent to 63 percent, leading to an estimated government-wide savings of $23.6 billion. Among federal agencies, 57 percent believe server virtualization takes priority over desktop virtualization, compared with 64 percent of state and local respondents. Although some form of desktop virtualization will be implemented by government agencies, less than one in 10 plans to virtualize all applications for all users, according to the report, which was underwritten by Microsoft and NetApp.

via Network Computing, continued here.