Many firms looking to move workloads from public cloud to private, on-prem: Faiz Shakir

The hybrid cloud has become the chosen strategy for Indian enterprises today. A recent survey by cloud computing firm Nutanix found that for Indian organizations, hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure is the greatest growth area, expected to grow from 12% adoption to 63% by 2026. A hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure is the one that leverages both public and private cloud through a single console.

In an interview, Faiz Shakir, managing director - sales, Nutanix India & SAARC discussed the various strategies that companies are adopting, and top trends in the industry. Edited excerpts:

What are the major trends that are seen in the way companies are adopting the cloud today?

Our survey has found that Indian companies are gravitating towards hybrid multi-cloud. The report shows that in the next three years, 87% of respondent companies in India would leverage more than one type of IT infrastructure which means that in some form or fashion, they would leverage the hybrid multi-cloud.

So the rate of adoption will see a 5x growth; 63% of the organizations will adopt full-fledged hybrid multi-cloud by 2026. That's music to our ears because that's exactly the business Nutanix plays.

Another finding of the report was that a significant number of respondents are very worried about the cost of public cloud infrastructure, the standalone infrastructure piece – which is the cost of AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. They're looking at ways to contain those costs by considering models of a hybrid workload where they can manage the cost ecosystem a lot better.

Apart from cost, what other differentiation does hybrid multi-cloud offer?

Cybersecurity is another critical aspect as well. There are certain applications companies would rather have on their own premise than have that on the public cloud. Hybrid multi cloud offers the choice of picking and choosing what application runs where.

Further, a factor to consider is that certain applications and workloads are elastic. For instance, e-commerce companies like Flipkart may face massive sales during the Big Billion Days sale. So during those days, workloads see a huge spike in consumption. There's a lot of merit in having those workloads on those specific days running on a public cloud, where you have, to some extent, what we would call unlimited resources available, but to have the same workloads run on a public cloud all 365 days is a waste of resources. Hybrid multi-cloud helps in dealing with such challenges.

What are the current cloud and IT infrastructure trends?

About five years back, most companies preferred either public cloud or private cloud. That attitude has changed and companies are looking at a combination of destinations. So that's the biggest change in trend – from either/or to both. 

The second change we have seen from a trend perspective is cloud repatriation, where a lot of public cloud customers are looking to move workloads back to on premise or to private cloud. It's insane to put all your workloads in a public cloud, because that's how expensive it's turning out to be.

What are the challenges of adopting hybrid multi cloud?

The challenge is that a lot of companies, especially modern companies, what we call cloud companies or digital natives – are born in the cloud. Which means that these companies  from day one have been using a public cloud offering. They don't have all the skill sets that are needed to manage hybrid multi-cloud. So skilling and finding the right staff is a bit of a challenge, but that's work in progress.