Security, integration and managing costs are among the top multicloud challenges faced by South African organisations – particularly as they look to assure agility and flexibility in an unpredictable environment.
This is according to Rowan Grierson, regional sales director for Sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix, who was addressing a webinar on the state of the cloud in Africa.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, multicloud is becoming the most deployed IT environment, and it is also the only IT model on an upward trajectory. It offers the most agile environment for supporting businesses, and supports the new remote and hybrid way of working,” he said. “We are seeing incredible adoption and interest in moving to hybrid multicloud models across Africa.”
Polls of webinar participants on whether they still felt hosting and controlling their cloud real estate themselves was important, 50% said it was, 15% said no, and 35% said they were happy to host in multiple environments. On the question of whether they had the skills in-house to support a move to cloud, only 27% said they had the skills, and 66% said they would need the support of a partner.
Grierson said: “You do need specialised skills to manage cloud environments, and this can become more complex in a multicloud environment.” Grierson noted that the recent Nutanix ITWeb cloud adoption survey had revealed that security concerns and integrating data across different cloud environments tied as a key concern, with 49% of respondents citing each of these as their top multicloud challenges. Managing costs across different environments was a concern for 43%, performance challenges was a concern for 42%, and 38% cited application mobility and capacity planning across different infrastructures as concerns.
Phillip de Waal, systems engineering manager – SADC & WECA at Nutanix, said: “In recent years, all of the conversation has been around cloud in general, this has now evolved to multicloud. Customers are looking at expanding to a multicloud environment where they can get the best of applicable offerings. The outcomes they are looking for include reducing risk, cost and time to refactor; improving time to value; optimising their existing investment in technology; integrating existing cloud environments to build a best of breed with the right applications in the right clouds; achieving seamless app mobility and high-performance access to apps and services.”
However, moving to cloud and multicloud was creating a range of new challenges for organisations, he said.
He said day 1 challenges include skill sets for new troubleshooting practices and a variety of scripts, addressing 3rd party integrations, and reconstructing policies. The day 2 – or management – include managing over provisioning, underutilised instances, cost spending complexities, different management tools for siloed infrastructures, a lack of transparency on resources and access to services and integration.
De Waal said moving to hybrid multicloud and addressing these key challenges was a journey: “The first step is infrastructure modernisation, then implementing unified management and automation, and then architecting for the hybrid cloud. To achieve a hybrid multicloud, you need license portability, native integration into cloud networking capability provided by your hyperscaler of choice, seamless migration and elasticity to move applications between cloud environments. All of that needs to run on top of a unified platform using the same skills and constructs, irrespective of where that is.
"Simply replatforming isn’t sufficient; new technology must accommodate skillsets as well as the change of processes. It needs to be streamlined and fit into the existing infrastructure,” he said.
De Waal explained that Nutanix offers one platform for hybrid multicloud with a unified control plane, unified APIs, natively built-in security, with full lifecycle management and complete license mobility across clouds.
“We provide the cloud on your terms, bringing private and public cloud together off a single management plane. It’s easy, intelligent and resilient. The Nutanix use cases we see among our customers include using Nutanix to support disaster recovery to quickly build out DR sites in any public cloud region; for on-demand elasticity to quickly burst into public cloud for a quick ramp and seasonal demand; and for lift and shift to move applications into the cloud with no code change.”
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