Public sector organisations are projected to accelerate their hybrid multi-cloud deployments nearly five-fold over the next three years, according to a recent study.
Nutanix’s fifth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption, reveaed a significant shift towards adopting mixed-IT infrastructure, with respondents expecting their general use of such infrastructure to reach 73 percent.
The survey also revealed that cybersecurity, data security, sovereignty, protection, and recovery are the primary drivers behind IT infrastructure purchasing decisions in the public sector.
With the COVID-19 pandemic underscoring the importance of agility and adaptability in government, education, and healthcare sectors, public sector IT leaders are increasingly embracing diverse IT environments. These environments include data centers, edge computing, colocation, and various public clouds to meet specific requirements.
“Public Sector CIOs are universally modernising their IT environments to effectively serve their constituents, missions, and mandates”, says Sammy Zoghlami, SVP EMEA, Nutanix.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of agility to swiftly adapt to changing circumstances in government, education, and healthcare sectors. Recognising this need, public sector IT leaders are embracing diverse IT environments, encompassing data centres, edge computing, colocation, and various public clouds to meet their individual specific requirements. This approach offers the freedom to locate and move workloads and apps where they best meet their strategic priorities; however, it also brings new challenges, including complexity inherent in hybrid multi-cloud environments.”
The report’s key findings shed light on the direction public sector organisations are heading:
Firstly, there is an anticipated five-fold increase in hybrid multi-cloud deployments, with a doubling of the use of multiple public clouds (“multi-cloud”). In contrast, the use of other IT operating models, such as on-premises infrastructure, is expected to decline.
Cybersecurity and data sovereignty emerge as the top drivers for IT infrastructure investment in the public sector. This includes the need to comply with national regulations regarding data storage and control. In contrast, cost is less frequently mentioned as a criterion.
Managing mixed IT environments presents challenges in data management, given the exponential growth in data volume and value in the public sector. The report highlights key challenges such as data analytics and orchestration, data protection and recovery, and data storage costs. Additionally, there is a visibility gap across the extended IT infrastructure, with room for improvement in integrated tools for hybrid IT operations. Without visibility, IT teams struggle to manage, secure, synchronise, and analyse data.
Improving data security stands out as the primary driver for application movement among public sector respondents. Nearly all global public sector respondents (98 percent) have moved applications between IT infrastructures in the past year, with 47 percent citing the desire to enhance their company’s security posture or meet regulatory requirements as the primary reason. Similarly, among all respondents, 46 percent highlighted improving data security as the top reason for application mobility.
Controlling IT costs remains a significant challenge, with 86 percent of public sector respondents and 85 percent of global respondents describing cloud cost control as a challenge. A significant proportion of these groups (36 percent of public sector organisations and 34 percent of global respondents) consider it a significant challenge.
The increasing diversity of IT infrastructure, coupled with a heightened emphasis on data storage, management, security, and services, is driving public sector IT professionals to seek hybrid operations that unify private and public infrastructure. Almost all respondents, including 95 percent of those in the public sector, express the desire for a single place to see and manage the various aspects of their diverse infrastructures. As these capabilities emerge, IT teams will gain access to unified tools that provide visibility into data locations, enable holistic management of applications and data, and facilitate adjustments to meet evolving requirements for data security, backup, compliance, performance, and cost.
The research was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers worldwide in December 2022 and January 2023.
