Johannesburg, 08 Sep 2020
Organisations should preserve the momentum of the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate their move to the cloud, said Paul Ruinaard, Regional Sales Director Sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix.
Speaking during a webinar hosted by Nutanix as part of the company’s Connect webinar series, Ruinaard said the 2019 Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index revealed that up to 73% of respondents in a survey of over 2 650 decision-makers say they are migrating applications away from the cloud back to on-premises infrastructures. However, 85% continue to rank hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model, and there are indications many plan to aggressively shift investment to hybrid cloud infrastructures.
“The Index is exposing what we didn’t know before, and highlighting that organisations are now discovering how difficult the move to cloud can be,” said Ruinaard. “It will be interesting to see how much knowledge will have developed during the pandemic, when we conduct the survey again later this year.”
Ruinaard said some of the challenges hindering the move to cloud and driving organisations to move workloads back out of the cloud included concerns about security and procurement models. “The cloud can get very expensive unless you know how to consume it appropriately,” he said. “The commercial side of business has to learn to adopt consumption-based models, where and how to consume, and to reduce the timeframes of their strategies. Traditional long-term procurement models negate the innovation of the cloud – a five-year model is just too long.”
He said the move to cloud was inevitable, with most organisations set to opt for a hybrid cloud model: “It’s mandatory to transition business models into a world where you can survive – particularly when the cost of legacy infrastructure is killing you and it’s not letting you innovate.”
Ruinaard said organisations should strive to preserve the momentum of COVID-19 to make boards look more closely at new solutions and overcome challenges in cloud migration and management.
A panel discussion moderated by Professor Herman Singh, CEO of Future Advisory and adjunct professor at the UCT Graduate School of Business, noted that proper planning and strategic procurement, security and the right skills would be needed to enable organisations to successfully migrate to the multi-cloud environment and achieve a return on investment.
Said Ruinaard: “In a multi-cloud environment, organisations will have an interface into multiple different worlds and on-premises infrastructure, so it will be important to have a control panel to seamlessly manoeuvre workloads to where it makes sense. Companies providing services to do this will likely be very successful in this space in future.”
The next webinar in the Nutanix Connect series will be hosted on Wednesday, 16 September, entitled: ‘Horizon busting – What will the post-cloud world look like?’ For more information and to register for this event, click here.
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