Nutanix study finds AI, security, and sustainability major drivers for cloud adoption

Key findings from this year’s report include:

• Hybrid multicloud infrastructure deployments will become an infrastructure standard. 90% of organisations that responded to the survey are taking a ‘cloud smart’ approach to their infrastructure strategy – leveraging the best environment (e.g., data centre, public cloud, edge) for each of their applications. As a result, hybrid and multicloud environments have become the de-facto infrastructure standard. Furthermore, over 80% of organisations believe hybrid IT environments are most beneficial to their ability to manage applications and data. Most importantly, this is now becoming an executive priority, with nearly half of respondents noting that implementing hybrid IT is a top priority for their CIO.
• Ransomware protection is top of mind for both CXOs and practitioners but most organisations continue to struggle in the wake of attacks. Ransomware and malware attacks will remain existential threats to modern enterprises, with the cat-and-mouse game between malicious factors and enterprise security professionals set to continue throughout 2024. Yet, data protection and recovery remain a challenge, with 71% of respondents who experienced a ransomware attack reporting that it took days or even weeks to restore full operations. To help address this, 78% of organisations say they plan to increase investments in ransomware protection solutions throughout this year.
• As organisations seek equilibrium driven by security and innovation, application and data movement remains a complex challenge. Enterprise workloads – including their applications and data – often find their way into the IT environment which best suits their needs, whether it’s an on-premises data centre, the public cloud, a smaller edge location, or a mix of all three. This diversity of application placement is part of the reason why 95% of organisations moved applications from one environment to another over the past year, with security and innovation as the top drivers. There can be significant roadblocks when it comes to executing complex application migrations, with 35% of the survey respondents saying workload and application migration is a significant challenge given their current IT infrastructure.
• IT teams aren’t just planning their sustainability programs, they are actively implementing them starting with IT modernisation. 88% of the ECI survey respondents agree that sustainability is a priority for their organisation. However, whereas the previous report revealed that action was limited, many organisations are now indicating that they are taking active steps to implement sustainability initiatives, with the most common being modernising IT infrastructure.
• Infrastructure modernisation is becoming an imperative, driven by AI, modern applications and data growth. Survey respondents identified increased investment to support AI strategy as their top priority, followed closely by investment in IT modernisation. Furthermore, 37% indicated that running AI applications on their current IT infrastructure will be a ‘significant’ challenge. In response, organisations are prioritising IT modernisation and edge infrastructure deployments to try and provide faster processing and access to data. This in turn can help improve their ability to link data from multiple environments to give better visibility into where data resides across their sprawling ecosystems.