Digital Transformation is Easier with Nutanix and the Public Cloud

What is the optimal way to achieve digital transformation?

The United Kingdom One Government Cloud Strategy (OGCS) published in 2021 explains how public sector organizations can transform their people, processes and technology to improve the services they deliver. The idea is to make services more accessible and deliver increased value for money.

A cloud-first strategy through the adoption of the public cloud is often the way that public sector organizations can achieve the best outcomes for all stakeholders.

What are the challenges of transformation?

The UK public sector has experienced severe economic headwinds post-pandemic, with huge pressure to increase staff to help alleviate a cost-of-living crisis while having to cope with higher inflation.  

However, the UK public sector has been slow to adopt the public cloud at scale and current estimates are that approximately 70% of public sector bodies still utilize legacy 3-tier systems in their own datacenters as their primary IT platform.

Factors that affect the rate of transformation likely include lack of capital, but Flexera’s 2023 study (see below) also cites technical complexity as a big obstacle.

Moving to the public cloud also has its challenges. According to the latest Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report, 85% of global public and private sector customers surveyed stated that public cloud costs were higher than expected and this was becoming a concern.

¹ Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report

What does the OGCS see as the key challenges inhibiting faster cloud adoption?

Cloud adoption is often slowed down by a variety of transformational complexities, including security, the need for new skills and cultural change, the risk of vendor lock-in, data and people sovereignty, cost management, and the challenge of moving off legacy infrastructure.

What is the Nutanix point of view on achieving faster transformation?

Nutanix believes that people, processes and technology drive digital transformation. The first step is IT modernization, which can result in a massive simplification of the technology stack.

Automation eliminates the tedious and time-consuming admin tasks and enables IT teams to transform people and processes to become more digitally focused.

Up to now, IT modernization could only happen if you purchased hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware to run in your datacenter. However, now with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), customers can perform this same modernization in Azure and AWS, and quickly decrease their reliance on legacy datacenter hardware.

IT teams can now move workloads from 3-tier legacy infrastructures to NC2 in just a few weeks instead of months of planning and app refactoring.

The time savings occurs because Nutanix eliminates the complexities associated with app refactoring. A typical cloud migration project can take 18-months, however, with Nutanix that can be reduced to just three months.

How does the NC2 solution on Azure work commercially?   

Microsoft built out its UK Azure South zone for NC2 using high-performance bare-metal hosts. With a minimum cluster size of three hosts required for resiliency, organizations start with a minimum of 108 cores.

The solution licensing is made up of Nutanix software licenses (based on CPU cores) and Azure bare-metal, all of which can be purchased via the Azure marketplace on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) or fixed term basis.

Nutanix licenses are also fully portable, which means IT teams can move workloads between different environments, such as from on-premises to Azure, and transfer their same Nutanix on-premises licenses to Azure. This is a true hybrid-cloud licensing model.

Customers manage NC2 bare-metal instances from their Nutanix dashboard in exactly the same manner as nodes in their datacenter, but without the deployment, networking and security integration complexities typically associated with hybrid clouds.

Elasticity and NC2

A primary benefit of the public cloud is a consumption model with tight links between cost and resource consumption. NC2 together with public cloud providers enable customers to purchase NC2 and bare-metal instances for time periods as short as a few hours or days with licensing that reflects the short-term use.

Being able to add bare-metal instances within a couple of hours enables IT teams to increase their NC2 cluster resources temporarily using PAYG licenses purchased through the cloud marketplace to cover only the peak demands.

What challenges does the NC2 solution solve?

According to the 2023 ECI report, more than four in five organizations find cloud costs higher than expected.

Most infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) cloud offerings are purchased in predefined “t-shirt sizes”, each with its own set of resources. This a cumbersome, manual process that requires you to determine app resource requirements. Unfortunately, the instance sizes often don’t optimally match your workload requirements, resulting in the procurement of larger underutilized instances.

This micro-waste can significantly increase costs as workload numbers increase. But with NC2, the customer purchases a smaller number of bare-metal instances to host densely populated apps and data. Nutanix software will auto size to optimize consumption of those resources to further increase efficiency.

According to an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analysis, using NC2 to power workloads in the public cloud can lower costs by up to 50% or more compared to using the cloud-native approach.

People and skills

Public clouds require a whole new set of skills, including technical and FinOps. These skills are in high demand, which has an implication on their cost and scarcity. The current UK public sector financial position suggests it is a major struggle to attract these skills and reskill existing staff.

NC2 requires management of only a handful of bare-metal instances rather than a thousand or more cloud-native instances, freeing up time from IT teams to focus on high-value projects. With extensive automation and a consistent approach to management via the UI, CLI or APIs, it is much simpler to scale deployments on-premises, in service providers or the public cloud without scaling IT teams.

This hybrid multicloud approach is underpinned by a world-class support organization – with Nutanix earning a Net Promoter Score of 90+ in customer loyalty for the past seven years.

Sustainability from IT modernization

Digital transformation and sustainability go hand-in-hand. Customers can enjoy significant reductions in IT energy consumption compared to their prior three-tier systems by modernizing IT with Nutanix. 

One such example, Manchester City Council reported that it was able to lower its rack occupancy by 90% and shut down its old and inefficient datacenters. 

Security, data sovereignty and vendor lock-in

The public cloud can offer world-class security, albeit in a shared responsibility model. The Nutanix software powering the NC2 platform offers strong and consistent security constructs across cloud locations on a prehardened STIG-compliant platform that can help to reduce the risk and impact of cyberattacks.

With portable licenses, customers choose where to run their workloads using the same Nutanix license that can be easily moved to any cloud or bare-metal service offered in the public cloud, by a service provider or back into your datacenter.

This flexibility reduces the risk of vendor lock-in while allowing workloads to be hosted in a way that complies with current data locality laws and enables you to adapt quickly to future changes.

What are the Nutanix NC2 solution benefits?

NC2 offers a simpler, faster and more cost-efficient route to a hybrid multicloud solution than application refactoring or use of public cloud-native VM instances. Some of its benefits and differentiators include:

• NC2 is not a managed service, but the public cloud deployment model for Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) software, the same Nutanix software as deployed and managed by customers on-premises in their datacenters. As such, apps and data are fully portable between environments without any code changes.
• Nutanix licenses are portable across any Nutanix environment (not all hybrid cloud solutions offer this capability).
• NC2 deploys into your existing hyperscaler account without complex network configurations between accounts (not the case for managed services).
• Cloud marketplaces enable Nutanix licenses and hyperscaler bare-metal instances.

Summary

Engage Nutanix or our partner community to build a pricing model to help you compare running workloads in the cloud. Nutanix can help you understand just how little time any migration would take:

NC2 is generally available in Azure and AWS public clouds, and there are some simple next steps you can take to learn more.

• Read the NC2 on Azure data sheet today.
• Take a free test drive of NC2 on Azure.
• Start a free trial of NC2 on Azure.
• Learn more: Read the documentation for requirements, SKU, FAQ, and more.
• Visit the Azure Marketplace to get started.

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