Only 40% of those surveyed have 100% visibility of where their data resides
Vanson Bourne conducted a fifth global annual survey on behalf of Nutanix to measure and analyse enterprises’ adoption of cloud. This year’s Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) showed that IT infrastructure is increasingly diverse which is making integrating data management and control harder.
The research showed most IT teams use more than one IT infrastructure and this trend is expected to intensify the future, although teams are already struggling with visibility of data across environments. Only 40% report complete visibility of where their data resides, which presumably raises all sorts of issues regarding compliance with data regulation such as the EU’s GDPR and countries such as Germany.
The ECI has seen in a big shift respondents’ attitudes over the last five years, towards 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 appear to see running workloads across public cloud, on-premises and at the edge as being inevitable.
The goal is to make this hybrid operating model more efficient, especially managing IT environments from the edge to the core. Tools that allow organisations to provision, move, manage, monitor and secure applications and data from a single console, uniformly, is a growing priority.
Key findings from the report include:
• Most organisations (60%) use more than one type of IT infrastructure and this is expected to increase to 74% in “the near future” and 94% say they’d benefit from having a single place to manage applications and data across diverse environments. Editor’s note: this is what Nutanix offers.
• Data security and management considerations dictate enterprises’ IT infrastructure choices – data security, protection and recovery, and sovereignty top the list of key drivers b and visibility is a growing challenge.
• Controlling cost ranks as a top IT challenge for 85% of respondents, while 34% rank it a “significant” challenge; specifically, application migration across clouds is an acute pain point for organisations according to 86% who think it can be complex and costly.
• Additionally 46% plan to repatriate some applications to on-premises datacentres to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead.
• Nearly all respondents (96%) have begun using Kubernetesorchestration but cite designing and configuring the underlying infrastructure, storage, and database services as among the top challenges.
• Sustainability is a higher IT priorityto their organisation than it was a year ago accordingto 92% of respondents, primarily driven by corporate Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives (63%), supply chain disruptions (59%), and customers’ purchasing decisions (48%).
“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’re hearing from customers is that there’s a need in the market for a cloud operating model to help build, operate, use and govern a hybrid multi-cloud to support all types of applications – starting today and planning for tomorrow.”