Most organizations are running their infrastructure on more than one environment, despite the added complexity they say they face in doing so. Moreover, the importance of multicloud will increase over the next three years.
Within three years, percent of enterprises worldwide expect to operate in a multicloud environment. 56 percent of enterprises with more than 5,000 employees have already done so. That’s according to a survey conducted by Vanson Bourne of 1,700 decision makers worldwide, commissioned by Nutanix. By a multi-cloud environment, the company understands an infrastructure in which an organization combines several cloud environments and embraces at least two public cloud services.
The increasing complexity does not stop there. 83 percent of those surveyed say a hybrid multicloud environment is ideal. In that case, on-premises infrastructure is also included in the story.
Simplicity
87 percent indicate that management of such environments should be simpler. 36 percent claim their environment is already fully integrated, 56 percent say there is at least partial synergy. This shows that there is still much margin for simplification. 49 percent state that both security and data integration are major challenges because of the different platforms, tools and dashboards that characterize cloud environments. Increased costs are an issue for 43 percent of those surveyed.
In summary, it seems that enterprises are eager to run their workloads in the most convenient location, but smooth operations are hampered by complexity. This is supported by another figure from the report: indeed, 80 percent indicated that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be a costly and time-consuming affair. That didn’t stop 91 percent from migrating at least one application to a new IT environment in the past year. So it looks like the benefits of the cloud outweigh the drawbacks despite the complexity of the multicloud model.
The right location for the right job
A minority are already today trying to best match workloads with specific infrastructure based on security, performance and cost. Finally, the survey offers some interesting insight into which location most organizations believe is most appropriate for a particular workload. For example, 40 percent think databases ideally run in a private environment, versus 30 percent in a public one. 19 percent prefer a tier-3 data center. For CRM/CX, the reverse is true and the public cloud is more popular with 38 percent versus 35 percent for the private cloud.
Public cloud is also preferred for collaboration tools and VDI. For disaster recovery and HR, most respondents choose a private environment. On big data and ERP, opinions are divided. In no case is the tier-3 data center the primary choice.
The study shows that large companies don’t want to simply step into the fairy tale of a single cloud provider. Hyperscalers like AWS may be trying to offer everything, but that doesn’t mean organizations are stepping into that story. Diversifying is popular, even with today’s complexity.