Nutanix has announced the findings of its third global Enterprise Cloud Index survey and research report which says that 86% of the respondent companies consider the hybrid cloud as the ideal IT infrastructure model and 46% said their investments in hybrid cloud have increased as a direct result of the pandemic.
It is pertinent to note that only 7% of the companies surveyed claim not to have full-time at-home workers in 2020.
The pandemic has shifted IT’s focus toward remote worker support and enabling near-instant infrastructure deployments that reach geographically distributed workforces, spurring increased enterprise progress with cloud expansion.
Additionally, a greater number of respondents running hybrid environments said they were likely to offer more flexible work setups, strengthen their business continuity plans, simplify operations, and increase digital conferencing usage because of the pandemic.
Other Findings
Another finding of the research is that businesses also increasingly rely on multiple public clouds. The report showed that among those who use public clouds, 63% of respondents use two or more public clouds, or multicloud, and respondents are also expecting this number to jump to 71% in the next 12 months.
Global respondents report taking the initial key steps to successfully run a hybrid environment, including adopting hyperconverged infrastructure in their datacenters and decommissioning non-cloud-enabled datacenters in favor of private and public cloud usage.
Remote work is here to stay — and companies are planning for it. In last year’s survey, about 27% of respondent companies had no full-time at-home workers. That number fell 20 percentage points this year to only 7% as a result of COVID-19.
However, by 2022, respondents predict that an average of 13% of companies will have no full-time remote employees at that time, less than half as many as a year ago in 2019, before COVID struck. Improving IT infrastructure (50%) and work-from-home capabilities (47%) have therefore become priorities for the next 12 to 18 months.
“COVID-19 has accelerated us into a new era of strategic IT and raised its profile considerably, and the findings from this year’s Enterprise Cloud Index reflect this new reality. Hybrid cloud is the frontrunner, and it will continue to be as we navigate our mixing of physical and virtual environments and move away from doing business in a single mode,” said Wendy M. Pfeiffer, Chief Information Officer of Nutanix.