Data management during cloud deployments is complex: Nutanix

Nutanix, a provider of hybrid multicloud computing, has released the results of its fifth annual Global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report. His ECI this year showed that IT infrastructures are becoming more diverse, challenging organizations to integrate data management and control.

The survey shows that most IT teams are leveraging multiple IT infrastructures, and this trend is expected to continue to grow. However, only 40% reported wanting more data visibility across their environment and being able to have full visibility of where their data resides.

Vanson Bourne conducted the survey on behalf of Nutanix for the fifth consecutive year, surveying 1,450 IT decision makers worldwide in December 2022 and January 2023. Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) regions.

Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solution marketing at Nutanix, said:

“Organizations are grappling with application and data management today across the edge, various clouds, and the core. “The market needs a cloud operating model that can be used, operated, managed, and managed to support all kinds of applications, and plans for tomorrow.”

Five years after conducting the ECI, respondents’ attitudes have changed dramatically toward using multiple IT environments. For example, in 2018, more than half of respondents said they expect to eventually run all their workloads exclusively in private or public clouds.

Rather than consolidating into a specific infrastructure or IT operating model that seemed desirable in 2018, most enterprises now see the necessity and benefits of running workloads in the public cloud, on-premises, and at the edge. is aware of

The organization’s current goal is to make this hybrid operating model more efficient, especially when it comes to managing IT environments from edge to core. Additionally, the diversification of cloud deployments has made managing application data across cloud environments significantly more complex. As a result, comprehensive tools that enable organizations to uniformly provision, move, manage, monitor, and secure applications and data from a single console are becoming increasingly important for IT departments.

Nearly all respondents said they would benefit from having a unified control plane for managing applications and data in diverse environments.

Some key findings from this year’s report include:

Most organizations have multiple types of IT infrastructure, and nearly all agree that a single platform to manage everything consistently would be ideal. Most (60%) of IT teams leverage multiple IT infrastructures, including a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, and on-premises data centers with hosted data centers. That number is expected to grow to nearly three-quarters (74%) soon. However, this presents challenges, with 94% saying they would benefit from managing their applications and data in one place across diverse environments.

Data security and management considerations drive IT infrastructure choices. Data drives enterprise infrastructure decisions, adding data security, protection and recovery, and sovereignty to the list of key drivers. However, visibility is an increasing challenge. While 94% of respondents agree that having full visibility is important, only 40% of ECI respondents say they have full visibility of where their data resides. reporting.

Cloud cost management ranks as the top IT management challenge. Eighty-five percent of respondents see cloud costs as a difficult IT management issue, with more than one-third (34%) ranking it as a “important” challenge. Specifically, migrating applications between clouds is currently a challenge for organizations, with 86% of respondents agreeing that migrating applications between environments can be complex and costly. increase. Additionally, almost half (46%) of respondents plan to move some applications back to on-premises data centers in the next year to reduce cloud costs.

Nearly all respondents (96%) have started using open source Kubernetes orchestration. However, they cited the design and configuration of the underlying infrastructure, storage, and database services as one of the biggest challenges they continue to face in deploying Kubernetes.

Sustainability is now an IT priority. Nearly all (92%) respondents agree that sustainability is more important to their organization than it was a year ago. This shift in priorities is driven primarily by corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives (63%), supply chain disruptions (59%), and customer purchasing decisions (48%). .