Over the past year, 95% of organizations say they moved applications from one environment to another, with security and innovation as the top drivers for the transfer, according to a new report commissioned by Nutanix.
As organizations try to balance security and innovation, application and data movement remain a complex challenge, in part due to the many locations where applications and data can reside. Enterprise workloads, applications and data can be in an on-premises data center, the cloud, a smaller edge location or a mix of all three. The IT environment that is ideal at the start of an enterprise workload venture can quickly become suboptimal as the project’s parameters and scope evolve.
Workload and Application Movement is a Challenge
In fact, 85% of survey respondents said they consider workload and app migration a challenge given their current IT infrastructure, and 35% say workload and application migration is a significant challenge. Organizations are thus hesitant to execute complex application migrations. Indeed, 89% of organizations believe moving workloads to a different cloud environment is costly and time-consuming.
People who regularly work with data know that data is going to inevitably become distributed, especially given the risk of centralizing all your data in one place. AI workloads, for example, only end up distributing data more, and the adoption of more sensors, IoT and edge suggests that more distributed data is inevitable.
IT leaders, however, have yet to become comfortable with the idea that the likely end state of all these migrations is a distributed model. Many IT leaders still think of on-prem, the cloud and even individual clouds as separate, siloed repositories of information.
This is indicative of the early stage of the market: We are just getting started with a hybrid cloud (a data center connected to a single cloud) and we’re even earlier on in the journey toward multi-cloud (moving data and apps across different hyperscalers and using multiple clouds). As IT leaders become more familiar and more comfortable or are even aware of the fact they can do all of this, there’s only going to be more interest over time, especially as they consider their cloud costs.
Application and Data Movement Will Increase
Going forward, enterprises should expect application and data movement to increase, and thus plan their infrastructure choices by emphasizing flexibility and visibility. Accommodating application and data movement remains a challenge: 51% of organizations say they lack interoperability between their various infrastructure environments.
Organizations must establish processes and operations to manage data and applications across environments, ideally as part of a larger IT modernization initiative. More specifically, organizations should design their IT environments to facilitate data and application portability. The growing pervasiveness of hybrid multi-cloud is proof that applications and data will continue to favor diversity and movement.
For Nutanix’s report, UK researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world in December 2023 to learn about the state of global enterprise cloud deployments. Respondents were asked about their biggest IT infrastructure and cloud-related data management initiatives and challenges.
The respondents spanned multiple industries, business sizes and geographies, including North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and the Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region.
You can read Nutanix’s full report here.
