Nutanix announced the findings of its third global Enterprise Cloud Index survey
and research report, which measures enterprise progress with adopting
private, hybrid and public clouds. This year, survey respondents were
also asked about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on current and
future IT decisions and strategy. A key finding: hybrid cloud is still
the frontrunner as the ideal IT infrastructure model (86% of respondents
think so), and respondents running hybrid environments are more likely
to plan to focus on strategic efforts and driving positive business
impact.
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.
The
majority of respondents (nearly 76%) reported the pandemic made them
think more strategically about IT, and nearly half (46%) 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% of respondents use two or more public clouds, or
multicloud, and respondents are also expecting this number to jump to
71% in the next 12 months.
Other key findings of this year's report include:
- 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 datacenters and decommissioning
non-cloud-enabled datacenters in favor 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 datacenters. Most
notably of the many infrastructure categories, respondents reported
running a mixed model of private cloud, public cloud, and traditional
datacenter more often than any other (nearly 26%), which is likely a
precursor to a hybrid cloud deployment.
- Remote work is here to stay - and companies are planning for it:
In last year's survey, about 27% of respondent companies had no
full-time at-home workers. That number fell 20 percentage points this
year to only 7% as a result of COVID-19. By 2022, respondents predict
that an average of 13% 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%) and
work-from-home capabilities (47%) have therefore become priorities for
the next 12 to 18 months.
- Strategic business outcomes, not economics, drive change today: Respondents
said their primary motives for modifying their IT infrastructures are
to get greater control of their IT resources (58%), gain the flexibility
to meet dynamic business requirements (55%), and improve support for
customers and remote workers (46%). By contrast, just 27% mentioned
cutting costs as a driver.
- Educators face unique COVID-19-related challenges and needs: More
education-industry respondents cited "ensuring that remote workers have
adequate hardware" as a primary challenge than any other issue. 47%
also cited providing "adequate communications channels among employees,
customers, and clients" as a top challenge. The education sector is
taking the right steps toward transformation, ranking high in private
cloud deployments, with 29% of respondents saying they were running
private clouds only (substantially more than the 22% global average).
"In
January, for many companies, technology was considered a basic function
of a business, enabling core organizational processes," said Wendy M.
Pfeiffer, Chief Information Officer of Nutanix. "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."
For the third consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 3,400 IT decision-makers around
the world about where they're running their business applications
today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their cloud
challenges are, and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other
IT projects and priorities. The respondent base spanned multiple
industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas;
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; and the Asia-Pacific and Japan
region.
To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full third Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index.