Delivering a Growth Agenda with Hybrid Multicloud

A growth agenda represents a strategic blueprint for businesses aimed at delivering expansion, innovation and long-term success. The primary goal of a growth agenda is to increase revenue, market share and profitability, while mitigating risk. 

Given the uncertain economic times facing businesses and IT organizations today, a growth agenda that includes fearless innovation, IT modernization and cloud optimization strategies is more important than ever.

These uncertain economic times have amplified the challenges associated with rapid technological change, forcing IT to confront the reality of digital disruption. Businesses are also grappling with an increasingly complex web of operational challenges such as app proliferation, business resilience, edge computing, AI, cloud decisions, and talent retention.

The implications of these diverse challenges are profound. It necessitates technological modernization of on-premises infrastructure that extends operations to the edge and cloud, which empowers you to run cloud-native apps anywhere.

Businesses must tackle these challenges while keeping a watchful eye on technical debt, IT complexity and sustainability, particularly regarding waste and energy consumption. Businesses are now responding by adopting a hybrid multicloud operating model that ensures resilience, agility and long-term survival.

Navigating the hybrid multicloud environment

As apps and data continue to proliferate across private datacenters, public cloud, service provider clouds, and the edge, a rebalancing of scales is imminent, requiring a common cloud platform. This includes a mix of private clouds in on-premises or hosted datacenters and public clouds, including hyperscalers and managed service providers .

Amid these challenges, the fifth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report released by Nutanix in 2023 presents interesting insights. According to the report, 74% of IT teams are expected to leverage more than one IT infrastructure in the next 1-3 years.

Research from the ECI report further shows that 99% of organizations have moved one or more apps to a different IT infrastructure in the past year and 94% would benefit from having a single, unified place to manage apps and data across clouds.

Navigating this complex landscape is no small feat. Companies will win if they streamline the technologies they use and make hybrid multicloud operations simple and cost-effective enough to run any app and workload anywhere.

Beyond operational simplicity, the agility to deploy apps quickly and run them anywhere is critical to any growth agenda. IT leaders can accelerate their growth agenda by modernizing infrastructure, securely extending it to public cloud or edge, and enabling cloud-native apps – including generative and other AI apps – to run anywhere.

Modernize infrastructure for resilience and agility

To thrive in the face of industry disruption, it’s essential for businesses to modernize their on-premises infrastructure. This imperative encompasses aspects such as sustainability, security, automation, business resilience, agility, and optimizing TCO.

According to the 2023 Nutanix ECI report, modernizing on-premises infrastructure can help organizations remain competitive, adapt quickly to changing business requirements and market conditions, and better leverage technology to achieve strategic goals.

Companies can modernize their infrastructure with the leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). HCI allows companies to power their business with advanced cloud technologies and simplify how they procure, deploy and manage IT services.

The benefits of modernizing infrastructure from traditional SAN approaches allows organizations to keep up with business change via the ability to deploy, scale and bridge to the public cloud so they can respond quickly to changing priorities.

HCI enables organizations to scale their infrastructure fast enough to support business needs while still meeting performance requirements and cost demands. Other benefits include reduced planned and unplanned downtime, improved efficiency in infrastructure management, and increased app and database performance.

Finally, with a modernized infrastructure, you improve availability by protecting services and data against hardware failures, disasters and cyber threats, all while realizing a lower TCO.

Scaling value: Extend to the edge and cloud

With public cloud costs on the rise, businesses looking to optimize cloud operations are seeking a better and more cost-effective path, while still striving for innovation at scale and the power of simplicity.

By extending from the edge to the cloud, organizations can achieve a more holistic view of their data operations, empowering them to make better decisions and improve operational efficiencies.

But innovation comes at a cost if you consider the findings of a recent IDC FutureScape Report,1 which describes an “application avalanche” of more than 750 million apps expected to hit the market by 2026.

IDC predicts that this data explosion will continue to increase and by 2026 50% of it will be generated at the edge. An eye-opening statistic is that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created globally every day.

With 90% of the world's data having been generated in just the last two years, it’s clear that the challenges of managing all this data will increase by orders of magnitude. Consequently, businesses  urgently need a proactive strategy today that extends infrastructure and security to the cloud and edge.

The extension to edge and cloud involves enabling talent, harnessing the power of AI and machine learning, and managing governance across systems, data and clouds. A unified cloud operating model is essential to manage external threats, risk and compliance.

Tying the knot between the edge and cloud ensures the extensibility and movement of data across all clouds, all infrastructures and all data stores. The goal is to create a single, unified operating model across all these environments. This can lead to a reduction in waste and churn and establish data as the kingpin of your organization.

Freedom to innovate: Run cloud-native apps anywhere

What’s also needed is the freedom to select and run on your preferred Kubernetes®

 (K8s) distribution, whichever ones those are, across a hybrid multicloud environment.

The ideal environment is one where organizations can build and deploy cloud-native apps on an intelligent distributed infrastructure and integrate with cloud-compatible storage – all within the same platform.

Further, the ideal platform will support a range of enterprise K8s providers, making it easy to deploy and configure K8s clusters in a matter of minutes. The ideal infrastructure platform empowers organizations to choose their clouds, apps and technology stack, while keeping the tools they love.

A platform that supports the mechanics of portability allows organizations to deploy and operate containerized apps cost-effectively and at scale across hybrid multicloud environments. It also includes rich application-aware data services to enable developer productivity and accelerate innovation.

Additionally, these apps can be moved back and forth across infrastructures throughout their lifecycle. The result? Organizations can innovate faster and deliver on the enterprise-grade practices and data services that users are accustomed to from their traditional apps.

Building modern apps requires an end-to-end, production-ready K8s environment with push-button simplicity while preserving the native user experience. The ideal K8s environment provides simple deployment and configuration to create production-ready K8s clusters in minutes – not days or weeks.

It must also be a comprehensive solution that allows you to easily integrate K8s storage, monitoring, logging, and alerting for a full cloud-native stack. And it should ensure that there is no vendor lock-in and deliver a native K8s user experience with open APIs.

The hybrid multicloud approach

A hybrid multicloud approach is the smart answer to today’s enterprise challenges. It gives organizations a single, unifying platform that uses consistent constructs and skillsets, quickly moves apps and data based on business requirements, and ensures resilient, agile and flexible operations.

The decision behind any technology investment must be rooted in simplicity. We urge organizations to ask their vendors the tough questions. Is your hybrid multicloud platform simple? Is it really a single unified platform? How will it enable us to focus on achieving optimal business outcomes? How will it allow us to do more with less?

To summarize, the future infrastructure stack will leverage a single, unifying platform that makes it easy to manage and run apps and data anywhere, maximizes performance, optimizes costs, and minimizes security risks.

Talk to Nutanix today about operating an open hybrid multicloud platform that will simplify cloud complexity so you can focus on delivering better business outcomes and driving innovation.

1  IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2022 Predictions Document number: # US48312921

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