Public Sector Is Accelerating Hybrid Cloud Adoption - Report

Nutanix has announced the global public sector industry findings of its third annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring organisations’ plans for adopting private, public and hybrid clouds. The findings point to a concentrated modernisation effort throughout the sector over the past few months, with 70 percent of respondents saying COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in their organisations. This COVID-19-spurred push is especially notable, given that the public sector has struggled with IT modernisation efforts.

While public sector organisations have historically grappled with regulations that deter remote work, the lockdown forced them to take necessary steps to securely support a remote workforce. Nearly half (48 percent) of global public sector respondents, said their organisations had no employees working remotely one year ago. However, since the onset of the pandemic, the sector has scaled its number of remote workers, with only 15 percent of respondents reporting employing zero remote workers today.  In order to effectively support this growing remote workforce, organizations have begun strategically evaluating their cloud models – with more than three-fourths (82 percent) of global public sector respondents identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model for their organization.

Other key findings of this year’s report include -

●        Modernisation is dependent on decommissioning legacy architectures - In 2019, 53 percent of global public sector organisations exclusively ran traditional, non-cloud-enabled datacentres. In 2020, that percentage dropped to 22 percent. Organisations are choosing to invest in private and public clouds instead, which will be integrated into a cohesively managed hybrid environment. Over the next five years, the public sector expects a 20-percentage-point drop in legacy datacentre installations and a substantial 43-point increase in hybrid cloud deployments.

●       Remote work remains top-of-mind - 43 percent of public sector respondents reported a direct increase in their public cloud investments as a direct result of the lockdown – eight points higher than the global average. These moves likely reflect an effort to quickly provide for remote working employees, as past restrictions made them less capable of providing work-from-home solutions than other industries. Moreover, most entities in this sector are planning to maintain support for remote work, with only 4 percent planning to go back to their pre-lockdown system.

●        Public sector organisations are enthusiastic about hybrid cloud - More than three-fourths (82 percent) of global public sector respondents identify hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model for their organisation. They’re evolving their infrastructures to get there, with reported plans that call for doubling their hybrid cloud usage within one year and growing their deployments to about 56 percent penetration within five years, up from just under 13 percent penetration today.

●        Security plays a large factor in deployment decisions - Security is top of mind for public sector organisations. Public sector respondents identified security, privacy and compliance as the number one factor driving their deployment decisions. Similarly, the majority of respondents in this industry (59 percent) identified these same factors as the reason for moving applications back on-premises.

“India’s public sector organisations are dealing with immensely high volumes of data on a daily basis and as a result, simplicity and security assume utmost importance. This is why hybrid cloud has emerged as the ideal IT environment for them- it offers a simple, scalable, secure infrastructure that can easily support heavy workloads during crucial periods,” said Ganesh Iyer,  Business Leader, Government segment, Nutanix India. “We have been successful in translating this value to public sector undertakings across various projects and key initiatives, all of which are directed towards improving citizen services.”

The 2020 respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the West Asia and Africa and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.