Indian enterprises are fully committed to hybrid cloud models and are viewing IT more strategically in their organisations, a report from Nutanix said.
As Covid-19 swept across the globe, enterprises overnight turned to cloud infrastructure to accommodate workers who were forced to work remotely.
The report shows that a hybrid model was the model of choice in India, with 63% of India's enterprises having increased their investment in the hybrid cloud as a direct result of the pandemic, compared to just 46%, globally.
The insights come from the third annual Enterprise Cloud Index, which measures progress with adopting private, hybrid and public clouds, and this year explored the impact of Covid-19 on current and future IT decisions and strategy.
According to the report, 97% respondents declared hybrid cloud was the correct architecture for their organisations, higher than the global average of 87%.
Organisations in India are also developing ambitious plans, the report concludes, with more than half (56%) saying they plan to run an integrated hybrid environment within five years.
Respondents also stated that traditional data centre penetration will drop from 13% to 3%.
Sharing his views on the report, Balakrishnan Anantharaman, Managing Director — Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix, said, “Cloud infrastructure is now a critical component of IT infrastructure, as Indian enterprises branch further into investing in digitisation and look for secure alternatives for their workloads. In the business environment brought about by the pandemic, flexibility and security have emerged to be of utmost importance, and Indian enterprises need the ability to match workloads to the best environment.”
He added, “The untapped potential of hybrid cloud solutions is finally being recognised by Indian companies as they move away from legacy IT systems and adopt cloud solutions.”
The findings also highlight that while cost savings are a driver in deciding to modernise IT infrastructures, it is not the primary factor. The key factors to modernisation are better control of IT resource usage (79%), increased speed to meet business needs (69%), and better support to customers (60%).
“India's organisations have recognised that Covid-19 has accelerated us into a new era of strategic IT and raised its profile considerably. The report suggests that India is a front runner when it comes to modernising IT infrastructures as we begin our journey into a new normal,” Balakrishnan summed up.
India's appetite for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is also apparent in the ECI report, with nearly three-fourths (72%) stating that they have already deployed or are in the process of deploying HCI, compared to 50% of global respondents.
“For true agility and scalability, hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure has been our architecture of choice. If you look at the priorities for CIOs today- security, application modernisation, and automation are on the top of the list. Hybrid cloud allows them the flexibility to choose the best environment for each of these needs, with the right cost management,” said Sendil Kumar Venkatesan, chief technology officer (CTO), Shriram Capital.
