While virtual machines (VMs) might seem like yesterday’s technology, they still play a crucial role in many IT infrastructures. The VM market is experiencing significant growth, driven by rising cloud adoption and the need for cost-effective computing solutions, with the market size projected to surpass USD 35.37 billion by 2032.
And as the VM footprint sprawls across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, a critical question emerges to overwhelm IT leaders across sectors: Are they managing them with the rigor today’s scale demands?
For IT leaders, these priorities consistently separate the cool-headed operators from the digital arsonists: visibility, automation, cost discipline, and security. Nail these, and you’ve got a VM ecosystem that’s fast, secure, and most importantly, financially sane.
Continue reading this article to explore why IT leaders must establish a foundation for control and rethink traditional, obsolete VM management operations.
Why Visibility Is the Foundation of Control
IT leaders understand that you can’t optimize what you can’t see. Currently, most enterprises are managing VM landscapes that are a cluttered collection of disparate resources, rather than a clear, coherent architecture. According to a Virtana survey, 86% of organizations say they don’t have a global view of cloud costs in minutes, and 71% admit that limited visibility across hybrid environments leads to inefficiencies and wasted time.
And the financial stakes are clear: CIO.com revealed that 31% of IT leaders report wasting up to 50% of their cloud budget, largely because fragmented environments make it hard to track, control, and govern spending.
Between cloud platforms, on-prem clusters, dev sandboxes, and that one rogue lab environment somebody forgot to tell you about, gaining centralized visibility has become non-negotiable. In essence, it enables IT professionals to:
Spot underutilized or abandoned VMs before they quietly drain budget;
Catch misconfigurations before they become security incidents;
Understand workload distribution and performance bottlenecks;
And enforce governance policies.
How Automation Helps You Operate at Scale
If your team is still manually provisioning, patching, or rightsizing VMs, you’re creating bottlenecks and inconsistencies. At enterprise scale, this approach simply doesn’t work. That’s where automation plays its part, turning VM operations into predictable workflows that run fast, repeatably, and with far fewer surprises.
Without automation, manual provisioning/migration introduces complexity and risk. According to Red Hat, manual patching, image management, and VM lifecycle management across large, mixed workloads bog down ops teams and increase the chance of misconfigurations. That’s why your forward-thinking peers use automation to:
Provision VMs with standardized images;
Seamlessly patch systems;
Auto-retire unused or orphaned VMs;
And right-size workloads based on dynamic usage patterns.
Automation empowers you to enforce quality without relying on humans to remember 19-step checklists, ensuring your VM environment behaves like a system.
Cost Discipline
While cost discipline may not be the most glamorous aspect of VM management, it’s the part that earns leadership support when advocating for modernization initiatives and long-term infrastructure improvements.
Ignoring VM sprawl leads to counterproductive outcomes. While cloud pricing models have made procuring resources easier, failing to implement the right observability tools will make it difficult to manage and optimize those resources. In the Cloud Wastage Statistics for 2025–2026 by Data Stack Hub, idle or stopped cloud resources (like VMs) can account for 10–15% of monthly invoices. More pressingly, Business2Community reports that over‑provisioning and “always-on” resources are expected to drive $26.6 billion in public cloud waste by 2025, largely from idle compute and orphaned storage.
Disciplined VM management gives IT leaders significant influence over both operations and budgets. By maintaining cost visibility, tracking usage, and proactively optimizing resources, teams can identify unused or over-provisioned VMs early and rein in runaway cloud bills.
Security and Compliance by Design
Security and compliance must be embedded into the VM lifecycle from the start. Every VM is a potential attack surface and a potential audit liability, making proactive management essential. IT leaders need to integrate security practices such as hardened base images, automated patching, network segmentation, role-based access control, and continuous monitoring across all VMs. Hypervisors, in particular, present a high-stakes risk. If misconfigured or compromised, they can give attackers control over all hosted VMs.
Compliance requirements (whether industry-specific regulations or internal corporate policies) demand traceability. A well-governed VM environment ensures that audits are simplified, policies are enforced automatically, and risk is minimized. This proactive approach allows enterprises to grow and scale their VM estate confidently without introducing gaps that could be exploited by attackers or trigger compliance failures. However, without strong VM governance, undocumented changes or “shadow” VMs can slip through, increasing both security risk and audit risk.
Internal auditors are explicitly advised to review policies around VM configuration, audit logs, and hypervisor patching. The Institute of Internal Auditors recommends that auditors verify configuration changes, log all VM access, and ensure template alignment with approved security baselines.
By designing security and compliance into the VM framework, IT leaders protect the enterprise and turn infrastructure governance into a strategic advantage.
How Can You Ensure a Smooth Path to Modernization?
VM management is the bridge to tomorrow’s infrastructure. Enterprises can’t effectively adopt containers, serverless architectures, or AI-driven operations if their VM environment is fragmented or inconsistent.
By standardizing VM configurations, enforcing lifecycle policies, and maintaining clean, optimized VM estates, IT leaders create a foundation that enables modernization initiatives to scale safely and efficiently. A mature VM strategy also supports hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, giving teams the flexibility to move workloads fluidly between environments. This reduces vendor lock-in, optimizes resource allocation, and enhances resilience across the enterprise.
Importantly, a well-managed VM estate enables IT teams to experiment with emerging technologies without fear of disrupting production systems, fostering a culture where innovation can thrive alongside operational stability.
The Bottom Line
If you treat compliance and governance as an afterthought, you’re leaving your virtual infrastructure exposed to financial waste, security vulnerabilities, and regulatory penalties. These risks grow exponentially as your VM estate scales.
That’s why IT leaders must embrace proactive orchestration where every VM provisioned, patched, resized, or decommissioned follows a consistent, auditable workflow that aligns with internal policies and external regulations. To give IT teams full visibility and control over the environment, consider:
Enforcing hardened base images;
Implementing automated patching;
Utilizing role-based access controls;
Segmenting the network;
And maintaining continuous monitoring.
This empowers your organization to scale confidently, innovate faster, and reduce operational overhead, all while minimizing exposure to security incidents or costly compliance failures.
IT leaders who embed governance at the core of their VM strategy don’t just manage infrastructure; they future-proof it, turning complex virtual environments into reliable, resilient, and auditable foundations that fuel growth, agility, and enterprise-wide trust.
