Hybrid multi-cloud is the future, finds global survey
But the multi-environment model brings problems with visibility and management, says Nutanix
A majority of IT decision makers believe hybrid multi-cloud is the future, according to the latest annual Enterprise Cloud Index survey, published today by Nutanix.
The survey, conducted for the hyper convergence vendor by Vanson Bourne, polled the views of 1,450 IT leaders around the world across sizes and sectors. It noted the steadily increasing number of environments used by organisations, with the majority (60%) now using more than one type of IT infrastructure, be that a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or an on-premises datacentre along with hosted infrastructure.
As infrastructure has diversified, with edge computing joining on-premises, hybrid and multiple public clouds in the enterprise, so the vision for the cloud has altered. In 2018 the goal was to consolidate resources onto a small number of platforms, but these days it's much more about storing data and running workloads where they are best suited.
However, the vendor notes, this multi-environment model brings problems with visibility and management, and can lead to inefficiency and poor performance. 94% said they'd benefit from having a single place to manage applications and data across diverse environments, but only 40% said they currently have complete visibility into their systems.
With rising prices, it's no surprise that cloud cost control was a top priority, and the difficulty in making the most of cloud services by being able to move applications between them was another pain point: 86% of respondents said this could be complex and costly.
Kubernetes is now widespread as a way of orchestrating applications across environments, the report finds, but designing and configuring the underlying infrastructure, storage and database services remains a significant challenge.
Meanwhile, sustainability is rising up the agenda, with 92% saying this is more important to their organisation than it was a year ago. Corporate ESG initiatives are making sustainability an issue for IT.
The steady shift to a more diverse operating model calls for a "cloud operating model" so that resources can be managed from a single control pane, said Lee Caswell, SVP product and solutions marketing at Nutanix.
"In the coming years, there will be hundreds of millions of applications created, which will generate unprecedented amounts of data," he said.
"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."