Remote Work Drives More Indian Enterprises to Adopt Multicloud: Nutanix

Enterprises are still maturing in their understanding of multicloud strategies, especially the security aspects. Nonetheless, they are cozying up to hybrid multicloud computing as remote work takes precedence, according to a new study.

Nutanix in its fourth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report have revealed that 84 percent of enterprises in India prefer hybrid multicloud as their ideal operating model, and that 58 percent are expecting to implement such environments within three years.

With extended remote work following the rise of Omicron, hybrid multicloud continues to be the most agile IT environment for supporting continued flexibility and resiliency, and access to applications and data.  Helping fuel this trend is the growing acceptance of the public cloud as an extension to private infrastructure and as a critical platform for supporting the shift to remote work, according to the ECI report.

Nearly one in five respondents from India (19 percent) said they already use three or more public cloud providers, outpacing the global (13 percent) and APAC regional averages (12 percent).

The ECI findings also highlight that India’s enterprises prioritize security more than their global counterparts, wherein 55 percent of India’s enterprises cited security and compliance as the prevailing reason for shifting applications to a different infrastructure in the past year, which is 14 percentage points higher than the global average (41 percent).

At the same time,  the report finds that enterprises are still maturing in their understanding of multicloud security management, or the management of security across dissimilar clouds. These enterprises are learning to reach for hybrid multicloud tools that enable centralized management to alleviate such issues.

“India’s digital transformation has been primarily fueled by Hybrid Multicloud adoption as it offers simplicity, agility, manageability and scalability that most organizations seek to compete in today’s digital world,” says Faiz Shakir, managing director – Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix.

“The findings of this report validate Nutanix’s strategy of offering Hybrid Multicloud Cloud as an Operating Platform for our customers, thereby providing them choice to use the best of public and private clouds, on their own terms,” adds Shakir.

As multicloud adoption rises, new challenges in IT security continues to figure prominently on all respondents’ lists this year regardless of the infrastructure type(s) in use, according to the report.

“As such, security is likely to stay top of mind in all enterprises indefinitely. India cited security slightly more often as “one of the biggest multicloud management challenges” than respondents elsewhere. They also often cited challenges with managing data, cost, performance, and capacity across dissimilar clouds, as did enterprises in other regions,” it says.

Nonetheless, companies in India are in the thick of the multicloud migration trend, and remote work support is a primary driver. Like their global and regional peers, they acknowledge potential hurdles with multicloud management, security, and application mobility as they ramp up adoption.

The study recommends that these concerns represent urgency for hybrid multicloud tools that provide unified visibility, security, and control of the entire IT infrastructure of private and public clouds.

Security, integrating data across clouds, and controlling cross-cloud costs, performance, and capacity top India’s list of cloud management challenges. These should abate as centralized, cloud-agnostic tools and container solutions grow increasingly available, the ECI report concludes.