Nutanix’ fifth Enterprise Cloud Index survey has revealed that enterprises need a cloud operating model with a consistent environment that covers on-premises edge and core data centers along with multiple public clouds, because tech estate complexities and costs are difficult to manage, secure and control.
UK researcher Vanson Bourne was commissioned by Nutanix to survey 1,450 IT decision-makers in December 2022 and January 2023. The respondents spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies. The survey found that most IT teams, as well as running data centers, have an edge and/or public cloud IT infrastructure – a trend that’s expected to intensify in the future – but they struggle with visibility of data across environments, and management.
Lee Caswell, SVP, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix, said: “In the coming years, there will be hundreds of millions of applications created, which will generate unprecedented amounts of data. Organizations are grappling with current application and data management across the edge, different clouds and in the core.”
“What this year’s ECI [study] 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.”
The top cloud-related trends identified in the report are:
- 99 percent of organizations have moved one or more applications to a different IT infrastructure in the past year
- 86 percent agree that moving applications can be complex and costly
- 94 percent would benefit from having a single, unified place to manage applications and data across clouds
There were five other findings:
- Most organizations 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.
- Data security and management considerations drive IT infrastructure choices.
- Cloud cost control ranks as a top IT management challenge.
- Nearly all respondents (96 percent) have begun using open-source Kubernetes orchestration.
- Sustainability is now an IT priority.
Unsurprisingly, the survey’s findings fit well with the stuff Nutanix sells: the Cloud Manager product has AIOps, Move data migration and cloud cost optimizing functions in place for its customers.
As an HCI vendor, Nutanix needs to have a single Nutanix application and resource provisioning, management and monitoring abstraction layer that covers the edge, data center and public clouds. This is a much bigger task than that facing storage-only suppliers such as NetApp, Qumulo and Pure Storage with their data fabrics. Nutanix has to provide an equivalent application fabric as well.
NetApp is possibly furthest down the road of being able to monitor and manage costs in the public clouds with its CloudOps software components in the BlueXP suite; think Spot and cloud cost brokerage, for example.
What Nutanix may be heading towards, we suspect, is a Nutanix-everywhere idea, an HPE GreenLake, Dell APEX-style approach to customers’ IT needs.
