Nutanix study: The central factors of IT modernization

According to the latest study report, the use of hybrid multicloud models is set to double in the next one to three years. The driving factors are artificial intelligence (AI), security and sustainability, which are putting additional pressure on IT managers.

Companies continue to struggle with the complexities of moving applications and data across different environments. Against this backdrop, the importance of hybrid multicloud infrastructures is increasing, according to the ECI report. The main reasons for migrating applications from one environment to another over the past twelve months were security and innovation, according to the study. As AI became the focus of companies, participants in the ECI survey cited increasing investment to support AI strategies as their top priority, closely followed by investment in IT modernization.

"Whether due to AI, sustainability or security, IT organizations are facing increasing pressure to rapidly modernize their IT infrastructure," said Lee Caswell, SVP, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix. "Eighty percent of respondents plan to invest in IT modernization and 85 percent plan to increase their investments specifically to support AI initiatives. This year's ECI report reveals that organizations must support the technologies of tomorrow by future-proofing their IT infrastructures today. The hybrid multicloud will continue to become the preferred infrastructure standard. This is because of the flexibility it provides to support traditional virtual machines as well as modern containerized applications and their migration between cloud and on-prem environments."

Key study results

• Hybrid multicloud infrastructures are becoming the infrastructure standard. 90 percent of respondents pursue a cloud-smart approach as part of their infrastructure strategy. They use the best environment for each of their applications - data center, public cloud or edge. Given the widespread adoption of this approach, it is no wonder that hybrid and multicloud environments have become the de facto standard for infrastructures. Furthermore, 80 percent of organizations see the greatest benefit of hybrid IT environments as being able to manage applications and data in equal measure. This capability is increasingly gaining priority status in top management, with almost half of respondents stating that the implementation of hybrid IT is a top priority for their CIOs.

• Ransomware protection is top of mind for CXOs and IT professionals alike, but most organizations are busy dealing with the aftermath of attacks. Attacks with ransomware and malware pose an existential threat to modern companies. Unfortunately, the cat-and-mouse game between malicious actors and corporate security specialists will continue in 2024. Accordingly, data protection and recovery will remain a challenge. For example, 71 percent of respondents who have experienced a ransomware attack reported that it took days or even weeks to fully restore operations. As a result, 78 percent of companies plan to increase their investment in ransomware protection solutions over the course of the year.

• The migration of applications and data remains a complex challenge in the area of conflict between security and innovation. In many cases, enterprise workloads, including their applications and data, are realized in the IT environment that best meets their specific requirements. This environment can be an on-prem data center, the public cloud, a smaller edge location or a mix of all three. Different deployment locations for applications are the reason why 95 percent of survey participants have migrated applications from one environment to another in the past year, with security and innovation being the motivating factors. Companies should therefore focus their infrastructure plans and decisions on making application and data migration a permanent state, with flexibility and transparency in mind. 35% of respondents described the migration of workloads and applications as a major challenge for their current IT infrastructure, which presented them with major hurdles when carrying out complex application migrations.

• IT teams don't just plan sustainability programs, they actively implement them - starting with the modernization of their IT. For 88% of respondents, sustainability is a priority in their organizations. However, in contrast to last year's study, according to which corresponding projects barely made it past the planning stage, many companies say they are taking active steps to put sustainability initiatives into practice. One of the most widespread steps is the modernization of IT infrastructure. This survey result is fascinating and shows the direct influence of infrastructure on sustainability goals.

• AI, application modernization and data growth make infrastructure modernization a must. Respondents to the ECI survey cited increasing investment to support AI strategies as their top priority, closely followed by investment in IT modernization. Furthermore, 37 percent of respondents identified the operation of AI applications on their existing IT infrastructure as a major challenge. To successfully overcome this challenge, companies prefer projects to modernize IT and provide edge infrastructures. This is because they can create the conditions for accelerating data access and processing. This in turn can help to connect data from different environments and make it more transparent where the data is located in the dynamic environments.

Source: www.nutanix.com