Dive Brief:
- Companies remain committed to multi-ecosystem IT strategies, according to the sixth annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index report, published last week. The software vendor commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey 1,500 IT and DevOps/platform engineering decision-makers in December.
- Four in 5 respondents said hybrid IT environments worked best for managing applications and data. Nearly half said hybrid IT represents a top priority for their CIO.
- Nutanix expects the use of hybrid multicloud models to double over the next one to three years as companies push IT modernization, the report said. The flexibility to run solutions across multiple clouds and on-premises was the top infrastructure choice driver for IT decision-makers, Nutanix found.
Dive Insight:
Hybrid IT environments were an inherent symptom of initial migrations from on-prem data centers. But as companies push forward with cloud adoption, hybrid has become part of broader optimization strategies.
“Enterprise workloads – including their applications and data – often find their way into the IT environment which best suits their needs, whether that environment is an on-premises data center, the public cloud, a smaller edge location or a mix of all three,” the report said.
Nearly all respondents said they moved applications from one environment to another in the last year.
The trend is driven by “the need to align application and data requirements with the most cost-effective and optimized platform,” according to David Linthicum, enterprise technology analyst at SiliconAngle and TheCube.
“This is not about moving to one platform, such as the cloud,” Linthicum told CIO Dive. “This is about backing the right systems into the right platforms, where they will provide better cost optimization and return more value to the business.”
Google Cloud, AWS and, most recently, Microsoft — the three largest hyperscalers — have taken steps to ease the financial burden associated with shifting workloads by offering limited egress charge waivers.
“The thing that gets me excited is a lot of the cloud providers are radically lowering their egress costs,” Marc Kermisch, global chief digital and information officer at CNH Industrial, said in an interview with CIO Dive. “It actually makes my ability to have a hybrid strategy and hybrid cloud much more of a reality.”
Generative AI is helping to push enterprises toward hybrid ecosystems, Sherard Griffin, senior director for Red Hat OpenShift AI, told CIO Dive.
“AI is probably the best use case for hybrid cloud because there are customers who cannot have their data moved into public cloud,” Griffin said. “They now have the choice to train models on prem and then deploy those models into their cloud provider without sharing sensitive data.”
