Blue sky and white cloud with sun light and rainbow
Cloudy Nutanix has noted that hybrid cloud is still the frontrunner as the ideal IT infrastructure mode and respondents running hybrid environments are more likely to plan to focus on strategic efforts and driving positive business impact.
Announcing the findings of its third global Enterprise Cloud Index survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. Nutanix was especially interested in the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on current and future IT decisions and strategy.
The pandemic has shifted IT’s focus toward remote worker support and enabling near-instant infrastructure deployments that reach geographically distributed workforces, spurring increased enterprise progress with cloud expansion. Additionally, a greater number of respondents running hybrid environments said they were likely to offer more flexible work setups, strengthen their business continuity plans, simplify operations, and increase digital conferencing usage because of the pandemic.
More than 76 percent reported the pandemic made them think more strategically about IT, and nearly half said their investments in hybrid cloud have increased as a direct result of the pandemic, including public and private clouds. Additionally, businesses also increasingly rely on multiple public clouds to meet their needs compared to previous years. The report showed that among those who use public clouds, 63 percent of respondents use two or more public clouds, or multicloud, and respondents are also expecting this number to jump to 71 percent in the next 12 months.
Apparently, enterprises have taken key steps toward reaching their IT operating model of choice. Global respondents report taking the initial key steps to successfully run a hybrid environment, including adopting hyperconverged infrastructure in their data centres and decommissioning non-cloud-enabled datacentres in favour of private and public cloud usage.
Global IT teams are also planning for substantial infrastructure changes; they foresee, on average, hybrid cloud deployments increasing by more than 37 percentage points over the next five years, with a corresponding 15-point drop in non-cloud-enabled datacentres. Most notably of the many infrastructure categories, respondents reported running a mixed model of private cloud, public cloud, and traditional datacentre more often than any other, which is likely a precursor to a hybrid cloud deployment.
The report said that remote work was here to stay — and companies were planning for it. In last year’s survey, about 27 percent of respondent companies had no full-time at-home workers. That number fell 20 percentage points this year to only seven percent as a result of COVID-19.
By 2022, respondents predict that an average of 13 per cent of companies will have no full-time remote employees at that time, less than half as many as a year ago in 2019, before COVID struck. Improving IT infrastructure (50 percent) and work-from-home capabilities (47 percent) have therefore become priorities for the next 12 to 18 months, the report said.
Nutanix Chief Information Officer Wendy M. Pfeiffer, said: “In January, for many companies, technology was considered a basic function of a business, enabling core organisational processes. Today, technology has taken on an entirely new meaning. It is a complex strategy and it makes or breaks a company’s long-term viability. COVID-19 has accelerated us into a new era of strategic IT and raised its profile considerably, and the findings from this year’s Enterprise Cloud Index reflect this new reality. Hybrid cloud is the frontrunner, and it will continue to be as we navigate our mixing of physical and virtual environments and move away from doing business in a single mode.”
