Nutanix's fifth global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) showed that IT infrastructure is increasingly diverse with organisations challenged with integrating data management and control. The research showed that most IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure – a trend that’s expected to intensify in the future.
What's happening in Singapore
Organisations in Singapore have largely embraced the hybrid multi-cloud. This is expected to continue in the coming years.
But there remains one challenge many organisations struggle to overcome – that of visibility of data across environments with 39% in Singapore admitting that they do not have complete visibility into where their data resides.
"As the amounts of applications and data generated continue to grow, many face challenges in the management across their various IT infrastructure – from the edge to core to cloud,” said Ho Chye Soon, Singapore country manager, Nutanix.
"We are seeing an increasing demand from our customers in Singapore and the wider region for a cloud operating platform that can unify, govern, and manage processes across the different clouds and applications to enable greater efficiency, enhance productivity, and streamline workflows and resources.”
Ho Chye Soon
Times are changing
In 2018, well over half of respondents globally said they envisioned running all workloads exclusively in either a private cloud or the public cloud one day. However, over the years this vision of one operating model has shifted to where most enterprises now see the inevitability, and even benefits, of running workloads across the public cloud, on-premises and at the edge.
The goal for organisations now is to make this hybrid operating model more efficient, especially when managing IT environments across the edge to the core. The growing level of diversity in cloud deployments creates enormous complexity in managing application data across cloud environments.
Comprehensive tools that allow organisations to provision, move, manage, monitor, and secure applications and data from a single console in a uniform manner is a growing priority for IT. Nearly all respondents say they’d benefit from having a single, unified control plane to manage applications and data across diverse environments.
Key findings for Singapore
Most organisations in Singapore use more than one type of IT infrastructure, and nearly all agree that having a single platform to manage them all consistently would be ideal. The report predicts that up to 91% of IT teams will leverage more than one IT infrastructure that may comprise of on-premises datacentre, private and public clouds, and multiple public clouds, up from 67% in 2022.
However, this leads to challenges and nearly all respondents (99%) say they would benefit from having a single place to manage applications and data across diverse environments.
Cybersecurity, data protection and recovery are the biggest IT infrastructure decision factors in Singapore. Data is driving infrastructure decisions for enterprises, with data security, protection and recovery topping the list of key drivers.
However, visibility into where all data resides was also a top-mentioned data management challenge. While 93% of respondents agree that having full visibility is important, 39% of ECI respondents report not having complete visibility into where their data resides. Nevertheless, this figure in Singapore is higher compared to just 35% of those in the APJ region and 40% of the full global ECI response base.
All respondent organisations in Singapore moved applications between infrastructures in the past 12 months. Improving their security posture, being able to meet regulatory requirements and the desire to integrate with cloud-native services were the biggest motivators for moving apps across infrastructure. On the other hand, cost of moving applications was no longer a critical consideration, with just 16% citing it as a key reason compared to 36% in the fourth Annual ECI report.
Cloud cost control ranks as a top IT management challenge. Among respondents in Singapore, 93% consider cloud cost a challenging IT management issue, and 40% expressed being “very concerned” with cloud costs in the context of their IT budgets for the coming year.
The application migration across clouds is currently a pain point for organisations with 93% of respondents agreeing that moving applications among environments can be complex and costly. Additionally, 56% plan to repatriate some applications to on-premises datacentres to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead.
Sustainability is now an IT priority with 95% of respondents in Singapore agreeing that sustainability is more important to their organisation than it was a year ago. This shift in priorities is primarily driven by supply chain disruptions (77%), Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives (71%), and customers’ purchasing decisions (60%).
