Different cloud environments increase complexity in data management

Nutanix, a company specializing in hybrid multi-cloud computing, has announced the results of its fifth global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) presented. The study measures the progress of enterprises in cloud adoption. According to the ECI, companies are using increasingly diverse IT environments, which presents them with the challenge of managing and controlling their data across environments. As a result, the majority of IT teams are deploying more than one IT infrastructure - a trend that is likely to increase in the future. At the same time, they struggle with data visibility across environments: Only 40 percent say they have a complete overview of where their data is stored.

More and more multiple IT environments

"In the coming years, hundreds of millions of applications will be developed that will generate unprecedented amounts of data," said Lee Caswell, SVP, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix. "Enterprises are wrestling with current application and data management between the edge, various clouds and their core infrastructure. This year's ECI report paints a picture of the situation that our customers continue to mirror to us: The market needs a cloud operating model that enables the development, operation, use and governance of hybrid multi-cloud environments to support all types of applications - today as well as tomorrow."

Over the past five years, the responses of study participants have moved overwhelmingly in the direction of using multiple IT environments. In 2018, more than half of respondents said they planned to one day run all workloads without exception in either a private cloud or the public cloud. But instead of working to consolidate to that infrastructure or IT operating model, as seemed desirable in 2018, most organizations today see the absolute necessity - as well as the associated benefits - of running workloads equally in the public cloud, on-premises and at the edge.

Central control of cloud environments

Meanwhile, enterprises are looking to make the hybrid operating model more efficient, especially in managing IT environments from the edge to the core infrastructure. Increasingly diverse cloud delivery models create tremendous complexity in managing application data across cloud environments. As a result, comprehensive tools that help organizations deploy, migrate, manage, monitor and secure applications and data in a unified way from a central management console are becoming increasingly important for IT. Accordingly, almost all respondents said they would benefit from a centralized and unified control console to manage their applications and data across cloud environments.

Key findings of the study

• Most organizations use more than one type of IT infrastructure, and almost all agree that using a central platform to manage them consistently would be ideal: the majority of IT teams (60 percent) use more than one IT infrastructure - whether a mix of private and public cloud environments, multiple public clouds, or the combination of an on-premises and hosted data center. According to respondents, this proportion is expected to rise to nearly three-quarters (74 percent) in the next one to three years. However, this trend also creates challenges: 94 percent of respondents said they would benefit from having a centralized place to manage their applications and data across different environments.
• Data security and management considerations drive IT infrastructure decisions: Data is at the heart of enterprise infrastructure decisions. The most important aspects here are data security and
  -protection, and data recovery and sovereignty. While 94 percent of respondents agreed that full transparency is important, only 40 percent said they have complete visibility into where their data resides.
• Controlling cloud costs is one of the biggest challenges in IT management: 85 percent of respondents see cloud costs as a challenge in IT management and more than a third (34 percent) rate them as a "significant" challenge. In particular, application migration across cloud environments is currently a big problem for enterprises, with 86 percent of respondents believing that migrating applications across cloud boundaries can be complex and costly. In addition, nearly half of respondents (46 percent) plan to bring some applications back into their own data center to reduce cloud costs over the next twelve months.
• Nearly all respondents (96 percent) have started using open source Kubernetes orchestration: However, they also indicated that developing and configuring the underlying infrastructure, storage, and database services were among the biggest challenges of their Kubernetes deployments.
• Sustainability is now a priority in IT: For nearly all respondents (92 percent), the issue of sustainability is more important in their company today than it was a year ago. This shift in priorities is primarily the result of corporate initiatives in the area of Environment, Social and Governance or ESG for short (63 percent), supply chain disruption (59 percent) and customer purchasing decisions (48 percent).

Source: Nutanix