Enterprise cloud computing leader – Nutanix, announced the findings of its first-ever global Enterprise Cloud Index report 2018. Nutanix commissioned VansonBourne to conduct research on enterprise plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. Over 2300 IT decision makers were interviewed globally coming from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies – Europe, Middle East, EMEA and Asia-Pacific.
The respondents were interviewed about where they are running their present business application and where do they plan to run them in the future. What are the different cloud challenges they face and how they manage their cloud budgets against other IT projects and initiatives.
While choosing the right platform to run their business applications, enterprises keep in mind several factors related to economics, performance, compliance, security and availability of the selected infrastructure.
The respondents indicated their use of both private and public cloud would rise sharply.
Enterprises also indicated that a few improvements in factors like cloud interoperability and application mobility would result in greater flexibility.
Lack of hybrid skillset and security were identified as the potential barriers to achieving these goals.
Enterprise requirements to optimize their cloud operations and matching applications to the suitable cloud environment are the reasons that might increase the hybrid cloud usage.
Per the research, 18% of respondents use hybrid cloud approach, and this number is predicted to increase to 26% in next 12 months and upto 41% in 12-24 months' time.
Among the respondents, 71% considered data security and compliance as the top factors in deciding workload provisioning. Performance was ranked at 62%, followed by ease of management at 53% and operational cost at 52%.
While choosing the right cloud for their application workload needs, IT teams look for predictable and unpredictable components. Predictable workloads characteristics like storage I/O requirements, concurrent users, bandwidth etc. can be easily predicted and hence can be cost-effectively run in a private cloud.
Workloads with unpredictable characteristics like mobile, IoT etc. can be run best in the public cloud. Per the report, 54% of respondents used private cloud for data backup and 51% for internal databases. While the others used public cloud for less predictable workloads like digital (46%) and IoT (41%).
Per the survey, 61% of respondents considered cloud interoperability as the primary benefit while adopting a hybrid cloud approach. Cloud Interoperability is the ability to move workloads/applications between various cloud environments easily. It helps IT teams to manage their cost in a better manner while still striking balance between performance, security and management requirements.
91% of the respondents ranked hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, yet there is a huge disparity when compared to the current hybrid cloud penetration level – which is just 18%.
Technical barriers and limited application mobility are the primary factors that cause this disparity.
Application mobility becomes important in the era of cloud and digital transformation. Enterprise IT teams want to run their workloads in the most suitable environment while maintaining business agility. The everchanging technology landscape also dynamically alters ideal runtime environment for any application at any given point of time. As such, IT teams avoid vendor lock-in and look for application mobility.
To avoid vendor lock-in, enterprise IT teams look to utilize multiple public cloud offerings. The number of companies planning to use more than one public cloud will increase from 12% to 18% within the coming two years. During this time period, 41% of companies plan to adopt the hybrid architecture, per the survey.
This means, companies would most probably look to increase interoperability between their public and private cloud, instead of managing it between multiple public clouds.
Per the survey, organizations using public cloud, spent 26% of their annual budget on it. This number can increase to 35% in two years. Here, only 6% of the organizations said they stayed under budget while 35% of them over-spent their IT budget.
Public clouds expenditures are difficult to forecast. With hybrid cloud model, organizations can simply move-back applications to private cloud to have better control over cost and to gain better visibility.
The report highlighted that though public cloud is important it alone is not a panacea. The respondents cited data governance, compliance, security, performance and TCO as the major decisive factors while choosing where to put application workloads.
Though, the Americas showed greater use of hybrid cloud (22%) and can increase to 31% within 12 months' time. However, the EMEA is set to surpass them with 43% of rise predicted within two years.