85% of enterprises back hybrid cloud as ideal operating model: Nutanix

About 85% of enterprises choose hybrid cloud as their ideal operating model, according to global enterprise cloud computing solutions provider and research firm Nutanix.

The company, in its second global Enterprise Cloud Index survey and research report,  said that creating and executing a cloud strategy has now turned into a multidimensional challenge.  What was once a value proposition in providing good capex savings through the public cloud has now transformed into an approach that echoes “the one size doesn’t fit all” strategy.

Interestingly, 73% of respondents stated that they are migrating away from the public cloud and back onto on-premise data centres, with 22% of them saying that they are moving five or more applications away from the public domain. Almost all respondents, 95% of them stated, that app mobility was critical and it was essential to be able to shift between public, private and multi-cloud environments as necessary.

Security top agenda

It comes as no surprise that security remains a big factor in the adoption of cloud strategies. About 60% of those surveyed stated that cloud security is the biggest influence on their plans around cloud adoption. Data security and compliance issues were a distant second (26%) as a criterion for choosing where enterprises need to run workloads.

Respondents differed in opinions when it came to the division of the most preferred type of cloud deployment, with 28% of respondents choosing the hybrid cloud as the most secure of all. Some 21% of professionals wanted to run a fully private cloud or on premise model.

A quarter of companies still behind the curve

Around 23.5% of the respondents said that they were not utilising any cloud technology today. But Nutanix claims that the responses indicate that enterprises that do not have any cloud deployments will fall from 23.5% to just 6.5% in just a year and again halve to 3% in two years.

The cloud adoption disparities in different geographies also seem to be negligible, with Americas reporting non cloud usage of 21% of respondents, which is just 4% less that the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region at 25% and 3% less than the APJ (Asia- Pacific and Japan) region at 24%.

Additionally, digital transformation seems to have played a big factor in the adoption of the cloud, with 72% of those surveyed directly crediting their digital transformation journeys to cloud implementations. Around 64% also stated that digital transformation was the topmost business priority within their companies.

“As organizations continue to grapple with complex digital transformation initiatives, flexibility and security are critical components to enable seamless and reliable cloud adoption,” said Wendy M. Pfeiffer, CIO of Nutanix.

Pfeiffer also stated that enterprises have moved forward in their understanding of the hybrid cloud, ”but there is still work to do when it comes to reaping all of its benefits,” she adds.

Nutanix said that it had surveyed more than 2,650 IT decision-makers across 24 countries globally on their cloud preferences.