COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in their organisations, according to a new Nutanix report
Nutanix’s third annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report found that more than 70 percent of respondents believed COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in their organisations – even the public sector which has struggled with IT modernisation efforts.
While public sector organisations have historically grappled with regulations that deter home working, the pandemic forced them to take necessary steps to securely support a remote workforce. Nearly half of global public sector respondents said their organisations had no employees working remotely one year ago. However, since the onset of the pandemic, the sector has scaled its number of remote workers, with only 15 percent of respondents reporting employing zero remote workers today.
Organisations have begun strategically evaluating their cloud models – with more than 82 percent of global public sector respondents identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model for their organisation, the report said.
The report also found that modernisation was dependent on decommissioning legacy architectures: In 2019, 53 percent of global public sector organisations exclusively ran traditional, non-cloud-enabled datacentres. In 2020, that percentage dropped to 22 percent. Organisations are choosing to invest in private and public clouds instead, which will be integrated into a cohesively managed hybrid environment. Over the next five years, the public sector expects a 20 percent point drop in legacy datacentre installations and a substantial 43 point increase in hybrid cloud deployments
Nearly half of public sector respondents reported a direct increase in their public cloud investments as a direct result of the pandemic – eight points higher than the global average. These moves likely reflect an effort to quickly provide for home working employees, as past restrictions made them less capable of providing work from home solutions than other industries. Moreover, most entities in this sector are planning to maintain support for home working, with only four percent planning to go back to their pre-pandemic approach.
Nutanix Director Andrew Puddephatt said: “The global pandemic certainly accelerated this push for modernisation as public sector organisations looked to maintain seamless operations and not fall foul of regulatory requirements by harnessing hybrid cloud models to enable and support the requirement for increasingly digital workplaces.”
The report can be found here.
