Intelligent Data Centres Issue 04 | Page 18

DATA CENTRE PREDICTIONS Aaron White, Regional Director – Middle East at Nutanix applications run, putting the organisation at potential risk • • With organisations moving to the hybrid cloud model, finding and retaining hybrid IT talent is proving to be a big challenge How do the results of the study to in How do the results of the relate study the relate Middle to East? in the Middle East? The UAE and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) were included as part of the study. Both countries threw up similar results and are grouped into a ‘Middle East’ bucket when reporting findings: • • The Middle East runs slightly fewer workloads in traditional data centres and outpaces the global and EMEA regional averages in its deployment of hybrid clouds • • Today, the Middle East runs half (50%) of its workloads in private and hybrid clouds • • In the next 12 to 24 months, companies in this region intend to move significant numbers of workloads out of their traditional data centres. Based on survey responses, Middle Eastern companies’ data centre penetration is expected to drop from 37% today to just 14% in that time frame • • Public cloud use shows the most growth in the Middle East over the next two years. Public clouds will then account for more than a third (36%) of the region’s overall workloads, followed by hybrid clouds at 29%, and private clouds and traditional data centres, collectively at 35% 18 Issue 04 • • While controlling public cloud spend was revealed to be a universal challenge among global respondents, the Middle East seems to be doing better than its peers with just 31% of the Middle Eastern respondents having reported being over budget with their public cloud services compared with 36% of global and EMEA respondents. • • In addition to managing their public cloud budgets better than their peers on average, Middle Eastern respondents more often reported that public clouds fully met their expectations than the rest of the world • • Data security and compliance and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) were ranked as the top benefits of using a public cloud in the Middle East Hybrid Cloud is mentioned a lot. Are most Hybrid cloud is mentioned a lot. businesses aware of its benefits? Are most businesses aware of its benefits? It is clear from Nutanix’s global Enterprise Cloud Index that organisations worldwide, including those in the UAE, are aware of the benefits of hybrid cloud, with 91% of the enterprises surveyed stating hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model. The reasons for this sea change away from the traditional data centre are many. In essence, however, organisations are both switching on to the benefits of the cloud – on-demand scalability, pay per use economics and so on – and, at the same time, becoming wise to the fact that not all clouds are the same. As a result many are opting for an application-centric approach to IT and choosing the best home for their apps – be that a public or private cloud– rather than modifying apps to always fit one chosen platform. Few are sticking with just one cloud and many would like to be able to move workloads around between clouds – for both technical and financial reasons – and it is this ability that has been ranked above cost and security concerns in the Enterprise Cloud Index survey. Unfortunately, we’re some way off being able to turn this aspiration for free movement of apps into a reality. Today there is a real lack of visibility when apps are deployed across a hybrid mix of clouds. Simply put, if you can’t see an app on every cloud it touches you can’t hope to manage it and fix it when things go wrong, or make sure it stays compliant. And you certainly can’t automate the processes involved. What is the relevance of Nutanix in today’s What is the relevance of cloud computing era? cloud Nutanix in today’s computing era? Most, if not all, businesses today are digital, when you consider the technologies they consume for every function, from human resources and accounting, to marketing and internal communications. What is driving this are the internal ‘clients’– the departments looking for this functionality and not the IT teams supporting them. Increasingly, the cloud – and, indeed, a multitude of clouds – is an attractive platform for businesses to manage and run their applications, often with the familiarity and simplicity of applications individuals might use in their own private lives. Thus, businesses needing flexibility, scalability and freedom have been using public cloud services, but this comes with challenges of usability and flexibility, and even a ‘lock-in’ to unknown costs and unused capacity as well as data and application mobility. This has rendered some IT staff focused on tactical management, reactive problem solving and blind discovery, versus thinking about the ‘customer experience’ within their organisations. Simply put, IT is losing relevance and influence at a time when no technology transition has ever been bigger. The antidote to public cloud lock-in is the freedom to easily move between clouds. It includes knowing the costs, the ability to choose the right location for the right data and the peace of mind that security and governance are not an afterthought. It is about blurring the lines between public and private, between renting and owning. Because it’s not all about technology. It’s about what the technology enables. www.intelligentdatacentres.com