Often there are bumps on the road to progress. Capturing the travelogue along the way can lead to valuable insights that help others take a faster, smoother path forward. A recent survey of 125 Nutanix customers revealed the main challenges IT teams face and what they need to manage applications and data across different IT environments.
Hybrid multicloud – a blend of private data centers and two or more public cloud services – has become the IT model of choice in recent years, as reported year over year the Enterprise Cloud Index.
However, building a hybrid cloud requires IT teams to be “cloud ready,” which means many things, including having the right skill sets and making sure their owned or private data centers can connect with public cloud services.
“Our customers are evolving their hybrid multicloud operations, so learning what pain points are holding them back can lead to better solutions,” said Kanchan Mirani, senior director of strategic marketing at Nutanix.
“Their top needs, which bubbled up from our recent customer survey, include quickly moving enterprise applications to the cloud, effectively managing resources across different platforms, and using those resources efficiently.”
See full infographic.
The customer survey showed that time to value, incompatible platforms and lack of visibility were the top challenges. It also found:
60% of respondents agreed that workload and data backup and data recovery (DR) are essential for businesses to achieve the highest level of data protection and recovery from failures and outages.
57% said they want a single management platform
with simplified operations across their hybrid
multicloud environment.
45% acknowledge that running in or moving enterprise workloads to cloud during spikes in business demand can make capacity planning difficult.
See full infographic.
“Moving workloads to the public cloud can be costly and time-consuming, but we’re seeing customers do it quickly and efficiently using our Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) platform,” Mirani said.
NC2 is the hybrid multicloud deployment model enabling consistent IT management across the entire hybrid multicloud, faster time-to-cloud value, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
“NC2 addresses many pain points,” Mirani said. “It allows IT to unify operations across owned data centers and public clouds, utilize one or more public clouds as backup and DR targets for either on-premises data centers or a different public cloud, and gain single-pane visibility of resources across different environments. NC2 also enables app and data mobility without risk
or relicensing.”
Mirani said that, with all the disruption Broadcom VMware customers are facing this year, including changes around VMC on AWS, many are looking for different ways to build their hybrid multicloud capabilities. She added that the Nutanix Cloud Platform with NC2 provides a viable alternative
“It's a very simple transition for customers who are running VMC on AWS to move to NC2 on AWS,” said Mirani.
Different Paths to Public Cloud and Challenges
The survey revealed that customers are moving or extending their IT environments to public cloud services for different reasons. Some developed a patchwork of silo’d cloud service instances.
The potential need to refactor applications so they can run in public cloud – a common issue for IT teams with legacy systems – is a major obstacle for some customers.
“Often they don't have the skills in-house for refactoring apps, so migrating is a real challenge for them,” Mirani said. “Other customers are asking if refactoring existing applications brings new business value, so they’re hesitant to devote so much time – spanning six months to a couple of years – and money towards paying down technical debt rather than investing in new capabilities.”
Instead, Mirani said customers are using NC2 to replicate their Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure environment and run that environment in a public cloud, such as Azure and AWS.
“Because it's exactly the same software stack moving a workload from an on-premises data center to the public cloud,” said Mirani.
She said that’s different from relying on VMC on AWS, AVS on Azure, or GCVE, which is managed by Google, because each of these cloud vendors has its own processes, structures, and software versions compared to an enterprise's on-premises environment.
Successfully Plugged to Public Cloud
One key benefit of NC2 is the ability to move to public cloud without having to go through that whole refactoring process. Over the past year, The Forecast has reported on Forestry and Land Scotland, a Scottish Government agency, and its migration from aging IT to the public cloud. Their initial use of NC2 has evolved beyond early expectations.
“The actual transition to the cloud using Nutanix was an experience that made our journey so much simpler and has bought the time that we need to modernize and transform our solutions into that next-gen approach,” said Nick Mahlitz, senior digital infrastructure manager at Forestry and Land Scotland, in a 2023 interview with The Forecast.
“We saw it as groundbreaking, as it delivered what we aspire to and it had benefits that perhaps we never really realized at the time that we now enjoy,” he said.
NC2 is helping the Agency’s IT team move away from legacy systems, including parts that have been around for 25 years. He said NC2 alleviated many mundane system management tasks, leaving more time for developing up-and-coming capabilities at the edge. Using NC2, Mahlitz’s team consolidated infrastructure, applications, and data.
“Full cloud integration means that we can now tap into other cloud products, cloud solutions and very easily integrate them into what we have, which before we didn't fully appreciate that we could do that,” Mahlitz said. “And as Nutanix expands their products and services in the cloud, we're only going to enjoy that more and more.”
Typically, the public sector moves ahead carefully, but Mahlitz said NC2 allowed them to take a novel approach and still do the necessary due diligence, to move to the cloud faster.
“Working in that agile manner, with a growth mindset, embracing technology, all the attitudes that really permeate behind a good digital team,” he said.
Mahlitz said his team is poised to onboard new AI and automation, not only in the data center but also deploy it in the field to help agency personnel do their part.
“Somebody with a chainsaw who's cutting down trees or somebody who's managing wildlife or our nurseries where we're planting our seedlings to then grow,” he said. He believes they can all benefit from new IT capabilities.
Editor’s note: Learn how Nutanix software can accelerate cloud adoption, improve cloud efficiency and simplify IT operations.
Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan.
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