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Enterprise Cloud For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition
the cloud, locally, or even as apps. Where traditional applications require deliberate maintenance, the new apps require
nimble, agile practices, which are often contrary to what has
been considered best practice for application support.
Modern application architectures are driving enterprise IT
needs. In the short term, a split has emerged in enterprise
IT teams, depending on whether they cater to traditional IT
applications or next‐gen applications. Organizations must find
ways to balance these conflicting goals.

The State of Public Cloud
In the early days of the public cloud, IT departments were
quaking in their boots as they foresaw the potential to lose
their jobs and their place in the organization. The era of the
public cloud was upon us and the hype was real. Doomsayers
predicted that IT pros would be out on the streets en masse
offering their administration and programming skills to passersby. Businesses would thrive as they saved trillions of dollars
in their budgets by eliminating all IT capital expenditures.
The post‐IT future hasn’t — and won’t — come to pass.
However, that doesn’t mean organizations have eliminated the
public cloud from usage. Instead, they’ve massively increased
use of the public cloud as they’ve discovered applications and
use cases where the public cloud makes sense.
But, the industry is far from the doomsday scenario that was
envisioned early on.

The growth of all things cloud
Clouds come in all shapes and sizes, and the different options
even have cute, little names. Figure 1‐1 gives an overview of
the various cloud types. It shows which entity — you or the
cloud provider — handles each of the elements that comprise
the infrastructure.
The industry is increasing adopting the three primary kinds
of public cloud: infrastructure‐as‐a‐service (IaaS), platform‐
as‐a‐service (PaaS), and software‐as‐a‐service (SaaS). In
fact, 451 Research indicates that the cloud computing

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