The Information Technology infrastructure of financial institutions in Brazil is often complex and heterogeneous. Many computing platforms are used in a complementary and interdependent way to support the company's products and services to its customers and business partners. Alongside some legacy applications and integrated solutions - hardware, software and services - purchased over the time not provide the desired level of resilience or compliance. As examples of operating systems most used we can mention the Linux in its various flavors, Windows and z / OS used in the absolute majority of data processing environments, large - Mainframes. Applications developed using these platforms based on integrated technology ends up being aligned to the business and then composing a complex network of IT assets linked and dependent that needs to be available 24 hours a day, every day. One of the challenges of the information technology administration is to maintain this infrastructure available, manageable and flexible enough to follow the business needs in its fluctuations (growth or shrinkage) ensuring the availability and compliance with standards of regulatory authorities as the Banco Central do Brasil, for example. As the most of these institutions has been pursuing this compliance and considering as a limiting factor the cost of doubling the IT infrastructure and the complexity of choosing a technology that allows a standard management platform-independent we face some questions such as: Virtualization can be used to provide the development of a set of plans for business continuity? How to change the technological base of the company in order to meet the issues of security, availability and performance causing minimal impact on its current structure? Being thus, The central idea of this work is a case study on virtualization technologies and their application to define a continuous process of managing business continuity in heterogeneous mission critical environments focuses in compliance and availability. This material can also be used as a reference for the development of an IT strategic planning providing a direction of technological purchases with these objectives (Compliance and availability). The work begins with a discussion of the virtualization first steps, the main concepts involved and their evolution. The following is an analysis of the advantages, disadvantages and justifications that are usually taken for adoption of virtualization by briefly passing by the expected return of investment after their implementation. Following a unique case study will be made in with a drawn of a large financial institution IT infrastructure scenario. The virtualization technologies already in use and those in the delivering process and its relationship with the strategic planning of the bank Technology information. At the end of the work, considering the projects results and their alignment with the COBIT (audit procedures) and ITIL (Management Services) will be justified the use of virtualization with the goal of business continuity.
