Hybrid multicloud computing company, Nutanix, has announced the findings of its fifth global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which highlights the increasing diversity in data management solutions as well as the fact that sustainability is now an IT priority.
IT infrastructure is also becoming increasingly diverse, with organisations challenged with integrating data management and control. The majority of IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure, a trend that is expected to intensify in the future, but struggle with visibility of data across environments with only 40 per cent reporting complete visibility into where their data resides.
In addition, nearly all (92 per cent) respondents agree that sustainability is more important to their organisation than it was a year ago. This shift in priorities is primarily driven by corporate Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives (63 per cent), supply chain disruptions (59 per cent), and customers’ purchasing decisions (48 per cent).
“In the coming years, there will be hundreds of millions of applications created, which will generate unprecedented amounts of data,” said Lee Caswell, SVP, product and solutions marketing at Nutanix. “Organisations are grappling with current application and data management across the edge, different clouds and in the core. What this year’s ECI shows, and what we are hearing from customers, is that there is a need in the market for a cloud operating model to help build, operate, use, and govern a hybrid multicloud to support all types of applications – starting today and planning for tomorrow.”
In the past five years of conducting the ECI, respondents’ attitudes have drastically shifted toward the use of multiple IT environments. In 2018, well over half of respondents said they envisioned running all workloads exclusively in either a private cloud or the public cloud one day. Rather than working to consolidate on a particular infrastructure or IT operating model, as seemed desirable in 2018, most enterprises now see the inevitability, and even benefits, of running workloads across public cloud, on-premises and at the edge.
The goal for organisations now is to make this hybrid operating model more efficient, especially when managing IT environments across the edge to the core. The growing level of diversity in cloud deployments creates enormous complexity in managing application data across cloud environments. Comprehensive tools that allow organisations to provision, move, manage, monitor, and secure applications and data from a single console in a uniform manner is a growing priority for IT. Nearly all respondents say they would benefit from having a single, unified control plane to manage applications and data across diverse environments.
This year’s report shows that the majority (60 per cent) of IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure, whether it is a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or an on-premises data centre along with a hosted data centre. That number is expected to grow to nearly three quarters (74 per cent) in the near future. However, this leads to challenges and 94 per cent say they would benefit from having a single place to manage applications and data across diverse environments.
Data is driving infrastructure decisions for enterprises, with data security, protection and recovery, and sovereignty topping the list of key drivers. However, visibility is a growing challenge. While 94 per cent of respondents agree that having full visibility is important, only 40 per cent of ECI respondents report having complete visibility into where their data resides.
85 per cent of responders considered cloud cost a challenging IT management issue, and more than a third (34 per cent) ranked it a ‘significant’ challenge. Specifically, application migration across clouds is currently a pain point for organisations with 86 per cent of respondents agreeing that moving applications among environments can be complex and costly. Additionally, nearly half of respondents (46 per cent) plan to repatriate some applications to on-premises data centres to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead.
