Public sector organizations lead the way in multicloud adoption

Nutanix announced the findings of its global 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption, including the United States federal government and global public education sub-sectors. According to the findings, more public sector organizations than the global average have adopted multicloud as a primary IT operating model. Adoption is expected to nearly double in the next three years, from 39% to 67%.

Multicloud is on the rise and has become the dominant IT architecture in use around the world, as well as in the public sector. Indeed, the global public education sub-sector reported the highest usage (69%) among all ECI respondents, with adoption nearly double the global average. The federal subsector in the United States is also far ahead of the average, with 47% using multicloud.

However, the complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for public sector organizations, with 85% agreeing that their organizations must simplify the management of multiple clouds in order to succeed. To address the top challenges of cost, security, interoperability, and data integration, 75% agree that a hybrid multicloud model, an IT operating model with multiple clouds, both private and public, with interoperability, is ideal.

“The evolution to a multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds is underway across the globe, with the public sector on the fast track,” said Chip George, VP of Public Sector at Nutanix. “This evolution requires a dedication to inherent, strong platform security to fully execute on the multicloud vision and extend capabilities from the core to the tactical edge. Public sector organizations must look to hybrid multicloud solutions that meet security requirements while delivering visibility, manageability, and consistent policy-enforcement coupled with tight cost control across environments.”

Respondents in the public sector survey were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they currently run business and mission-critical applications, and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the pandemic’s impact on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions, as well as how IT strategy and priorities may change as a result of it. The following are the key findings from this year’s report:

• Public sector organizations face multicloud challenges, including securing their data across multiple clouds (49%), application mobility (47%), security (46%) and managing costs (45%). Additionally, given that nearly all (97%) of U.S. federal, 86% of public education, and 87% of all global public sector organizations cited they lack some IT skills to meet current business demands, simplifying operations is likely to be a key focus for many in the year ahead. However, IT leaders are realizing that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud, making hybrid multicloud ideal according to the majority of respondents (75%). This model will help address some of the key challenges of multicloud deployments by providing a unified cloud environment on which security and data governance policies can be applied uniformly.
• Public sector organizations are optimistic about application mobility. Application mobility is a critical multicloud and cloud-smart optimization enabler, and while 75% of public sector organizations moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last year, it’s well below the average across industries (91%). Those that did cited improving security and/or meeting regulatory requirements (33%), gaining control (31%), and performance (30%) as the top drivers. Moreover, 76% agreed that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming, versus 80% of all respondents across industries, indicating that application mobility is perceived to be slightly less problematic. Public education organizations, which are ahead of the multicloud curve, were even more optimistic with only 56% agreeing on difficulty of application mobility while U.S. federal organizations had the highest level of concern, with 77% agreeing. 
• Top public sector IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (46%), storage (41%), 5G implementation (39%), and improving multicloud management (39%). Global public sector respondents also said that the ongoing pandemic spurred them to increase their IT spending in certain areas that emphasize bolstering their security posture (55%), implementing AI-based self-service technology (50%), and upgrading existing IT infrastructure (40%).