Managing data is complex amidst cloud deployments: Nutanix

Nutanix, a provider of hybrid multi-cloud computing, has announced the findings of its fifth global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption. This year's ECI showed that IT infrastructure is increasingly diverse, with organisations challenged in integrating data management and control. 

The research showed that most IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure, a trend expected to intensify. However, they need more data visibility across environments, with only 40% reporting complete visibility into where their data resides.

For the fifth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers worldwide in December 2022 and January 2023. The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region. 

"In the coming years, there will be hundreds of millions of applications created, which will generate unprecedented amounts of data," says Lee Caswell, senior vice president of 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."

In the past five years of conducting the ECI, respondents' attitudes have drastically shifted toward using multiple IT environments. For example, in 2018, well over half of respondents said they envisioned running all workloads exclusively in either a private or 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 see the inevitability and benefits of running workloads across the public cloud, on-premises and at the edge. 

The goal for organisations now is to make this hybrid operating model more efficient, especially when managing IT environments across the edge to the core. In addition, the growing diversity in cloud deployments creates enormous complexity in managing application data across cloud environments. As a result, comprehensive tools that allow organisations to provision, move, manage, monitor, and secure applications and data from a single console uniformly are a growing priority for IT. 

Nearly all respondents say they'd benefit from having a unified control plane to manage applications and data across diverse environments.   

The several key findings from the year's report are as follows.

Most organisations use more than one type of IT infrastructure, and nearly all agree that having a single platform to manage them all consistently would be ideal. Most (60%) of IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure, whether a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or an on-premises data centre with a hosted data centre. That number is expected to grow to nearly three quarters (74%) soon. However, this leads to challenges, and 94% say they'd benefit from having a single place to manage applications and data across diverse environments.

Data security and management considerations drive IT infrastructure choices. Data drives infrastructure decisions for enterprises, with data security, protection and recovery, and sovereignty topping the list of key drivers. However, visibility is a growing challenge. While 94% of respondents agree that having complete visibility is important, only 40% of ECI respondents report having complete visibility into where their data resides.

Cloud cost control ranks as a top IT management challenge. Among respondents, 85% consider cloud cost a challenging IT management issue, and more than a third (34%) rank it as a "significant" challenge. Specifically, application migration across clouds is currently a pain point for organisations, with 86% of respondents agreeing that moving applications among environments can be complex and costly. Additionally, nearly half of the respondents (46%) plan to repatriate some applications to on-premises data centres to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead. 

Nearly all respondents (96%) have begun using open-source Kubernetes orchestration. But they cite designing and configuring the underlying infrastructure, storage, and database services as among the top challenges they continue to face with their Kubernetes deployments.

Sustainability is now an IT priority. Nearly all (92%) respondents agree that sustainability is more important to their organisation than a year ago. This shift in priorities is primarily driven by corporate Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives (63%), supply chain disruptions (59%), and customers' purchasing decisions (48%).