Nutanix announced the financial services industry findings of its third annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring organizations' plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. The findings point to a digital transformation within the industry, with half of respondents (50%) reporting that COVID-19 caused them to increase their investment in hybrid cloud.

In the industry's five-year outlook, hybrid cloud is the only IT model showing positive growth among financial company respondents, and it is expected to increase by 39% in that timeframe. In addition, 43% of financial services companies plan to increase their investment in private cloud over the next year, 10% higher than the global average (33%) - pinpointing that private cloud adoption is crucial to creating a modern hybrid cloud.

Other key findings of this year's report include:

• Security concerns are driving private cloud adoption: Financial services organizations ranked security, privacy, and compliance issues as the most concerning when running applications within public cloud solutions (62%). Respondents were less concerned with public cloud capacity (30%), showing that while public cloud has the capabilities to support IT infrastructures, the security of sensitive data is non-negotiable, and organizations are looking for alternative solutions.
• Investment in hyperconverged infrastructure shows the industry's confidence in private cloud: Nearly 50% of financial sector respondents say they've either fully deployed HCI or are in the process of doing so, while 38% report they will be deploying HCI within the next 12 to 24 months. This investment is directly aligned with increased private cloud adoption, as HCI reduces the time it takes to build the software-defined, scalable infrastructure necessary to support private cloud.
• Financial services organizations are looking to optimize their cloud usage: The sector's top motivations for modernizing its IT infrastructure is to gain greater control of IT resource usage (59%) and to gain the speed (58%), and flexibility needed (55%) to meet business requirements.
• The industry must invest in talent to support a hybrid cloud environment: More than a third of financial services respondents (36%) said they were short on skills needed to manage mixed private/public cloud environments, while 34% said they lacked expertise in cloud-native technologies and containers, including Kubernetes. These issues have contributed to organizational struggles to fully adopt hybrid cloud.

"Historically, financial services organizations have explored public cloud offerings when decommissioning legacy datacenters," said Tapan Mehta, Director, Industries Solution Marketing at Nutanix. "However, as the industry continues to place greater interest in data privacy and compliance issues, organizations are turning to the private cloud. This rapid increase in private cloud adoption serves as the basis for a hybrid cloud model, which is expected to become the industry norm over the next few years."

The 2020 respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.

To learn more about the financial services findings, please download the report here.