India’s digital transformation has been primarily fueled by adoption of hybrid multicloud as it offers simplicity, agility, manageability and scalability. San Jose, California-based cloud computing software firm Nutanix says its fourth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report has revealed that 84% of enterprises in India prefer hybrid multicloud as their ideal operating model, and that 58% are expecting to implement such environments within three years. “At the same time, enterprises are still maturing in their understanding of multicloud security management, or the management of security across dissimilar clouds,” Faiz Shakir, managing director – sales, India & Saarc, Nutanix, tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interview. Excerpts:
What is driving India’s enterprises to adopt multicloud?
Nutanix’s fourth annual Enterprise Cloud Index for India found that one-third of enterprises are currently using a multicloud environment. They have realised that they need to meet each workload’s specific requirements for factors including security, performance, cost and business continuity, and this involves matching each application to the infrastructure best suited to it. For many organisations, this requires using multiple IT environments and both private and public clouds. Since the pandemic, no business has been able to ignore these benefits of multicloud.
How can security challenges be overcome in multicloud environments?
India’s enterprises are prioritising security more than their global and APJ counterparts—55% have identified security and compliance as the prevailing reason for shifting applications to a different infrastructure in 2021. On top of this, 50% have also identified security as a prevailing challenge of managing multicloud. This is where hybrid multicloud comes in as the perfect solution. With cloud security, organisations are also dealing with an ecosystem of IT administrators, processes and policies, and security solutions. Due to this, cloud security is customisable to each organisation and needs a simplified, single-pane-of-glass management that makes security simpler.
Is hybrid multicloud more suitable for a certain organisational size?
Around 84% of India’s enterprises have declared that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model for their business. This finding reflects the perception of both large and small enterprises, across sectors, as per our report. The freedom and scalability this model provides is ideal for fast-growing businesses and large enterprises alike, and this is something we have seen first-hand with our customers; India has a large startup ecosystem for which the ability to quickly deploy or scale back workloads at the click of a button, without major costs, is essential. Take Gupshup—a conversational messaging service and a recent unicorn—which has implemented the Nutanix platform to get the benefit of security on-premise and when it needs to scale out onto the public cloud it can do so easily. Even for large enterprises that needed to quickly cater to a remote workforce during the pandemic or deploy more digital services for remote customers, such a model is ideal. We have customers across every major sector deploying hybrid multicloud; a large private bank in Mumbai runs its primary sites on-prem while its disaster recovery runs on the public cloud, and the Nutanix platform enables this.
How do you see cloud adoption impacting the future of business in India?
Data, which will continue growing in volume and value, will be better managed in a hybrid multicloud environment, giving the business more opportunities to utilise that data for better insights and without high risks. Businesses will also have the freedom to become more customer-centric with the hybrid multicloud model. If they need to add services or new applications to really deliver on customer needs at a moment’s notice, their IT environment won’t hold them back.
Similarly, security considerations will not dictate their business strategies, as they can retain confidential data on their private clouds and still have a good degree of integration with their workloads that sit on public clouds.
