'Public cloud is not a panacea' - 91% of IT leaders want hybrid

Nutanix announced the findings of its first annual global Enterprise Cloud Index, measuring enterprise plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds.

The new report found enterprises plan to increase hybrid cloud usage, with 91% stating hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, but only 18% stating they have that model today.

The findings also revealed that application mobility across any cloud is a top priority for 97% of respondents with 88% of respondents saying it would "solve a lot of my problems.

Additionally, the report found public cloud is not a panacea - IT decision makers ranked matching applications to the right cloud environment as a critical capability, and 35% of organisations using public clouds overspent their annual budget.

When asked to rank the primary benefits of hybrid cloud, interoperability between cloud types (23%) and the ability to move applications back and forth between clouds (16%) outranked cost (6%) and security (5%) as the primary benefits.

Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey IT decision makers about where they are running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, challenges in setting up their cloud environments and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities.

The survey resulted in approximately 2,300 respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas - Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.

In roles centred on agility and digital transformation, IT teams understand that runtime environments for enterprise apps change constantly.

Respondents indicated a need for greater orchestration and application mobility across cloud environments, as they seek flexibility to move apps to the 'right' cloud on a more dynamic basis.

In addition, shadow IT practices that circumvent enterprise IT teams are posing a significant challenge to forecasting and controlling public cloud spend with well over half of respondents (57%) reporting one or more incidents of shadow IT.

Other key findings of the report include:

• Hybrid cloud better addresses business needs over single public cloud, including the price tag: 87% of respondents said that hybrid cloud as an IT trend is having a positive impact on their businesses, and more hybrid cloud users reported all their needs were being met (49%) compared to single public cloud users (37%).

Furthermore, organisations that use public cloud spend 26% of their annual IT budget on public cloud. Perhaps most striking is the fact that only 6% using public cloud came in under budget, while nearly six times as many (35%) overspent in their use of public cloud resources

• Security is top of mind for determining workloads: 71% of respondents surveyed for the report ranked data security and regulatory compliance as the top factor in determining where to provision their workloads. This was followed by performance at 62%, ease of management at 53%, and cost at 52%.

• App developers today are circumventing IT: 57% of respondents said their developers are circumventing IT when it comes to deciding where applications run, putting the organisation at potential risk.

• Finding hybrid IT talent is difficult: With clear benefits to a hybrid model, respondents say scarcity of hybrid experts is a challenge, with 54% claiming talent retention is part of the problem.

• EMEA is expected to surpass the Americas with hybrid cloud adoption: Regionally, the Americas reported greater use of hybrid clouds now (22%) and within 12 months' time (31%). However, the two-year outlook has EMEA (43%) surpassing the Americas' hybrid plans (39%) and APJ (39%) catching up.

"As enterprises demand stronger application mobility and interoperability, they are increasingly choosing hybrid cloud infrastructure," says Nutanix chief marketing officer Ben Gibson.

"While the advent of public cloud has increased IT efficiency in certain areas, hybrid cloud capabilities are the next step in providing the freedom to dynamically provision and manage applications based on business needs.

"However, the findings of this study reveal an important gap in the market: organisations need IT talent to manage their hybrid cloud models, especially in the next 12 to 24 months.

Note: For the purposes of this study, hybrid cloud describes 'the combined use of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud service, with some degree of integration between the two cloud environments.'