More public-sector organisations than average have adopted multi-cloud as a primary IT operating model, outpacing the global average, the public-sector supplement of the 4th annual Enterprise Cloud Index from Nutanix shows.
Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world in August and September 2021. The public-sector part is based on the responses of 491 IT professionals.
Finding shows that multi-cloud adoption is expected to nearly double from 39% to 67% in the next three years.
The global public education sub-sector reported the largest usage among all respondents (69%), with adoption nearly twice the global average. The United States federal sub-sector is also well ahead of the average, with 47% having adopted multi-cloud.
However, the complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for public-sector groups as 85% agreed that, to succeed, they need to simplify the management of multiple clouds.
To address top challenges related to cost, security, interoperability, and data integration, 75% agree that a hybrid multi-cloud model, an IT operating model with multiple clouds both private and public with interoperability between, is ideal.
“Public sector organisations must look to hybrid multi-cloud solutions that meet security requirements while delivering visibility, manageability, and consistent policy-enforcement coupled with tight cost control across environments,” said Chip George, VP of public sector at Nutanix.
The report noted that public-sector organisations face multi-cloud challenges, including securing their data across multiple clouds (49%), application mobility (47%), security (46%) and managing costs (45%).
IT leaders are realising that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud, making hybrid multi-cloud ideal according to the majority of respondents (75%). This model will help address some of the key challenges of multi-cloud deployments by providing a unified cloud environment on which security and data governance policies can be applied uniformly.
Also, public sector organisations are optimistic about application mobility, with 75% having moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last year — well below the average across industries (91%).
Public education organisations, which are ahead of the multi-cloud curve, were even more optimistic with only 56% agreeing on difficulty of application mobility while US federal organisations had the highest level of concern with 77% agreeing.
Further, top public-sector IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (46%), storage (41%), 5G implementation (39%), and improving multi-cloud management (39%).
Global public-sector respondents also said that the ongoing pandemic spurred them to increase their IT spending in certain areas that emphasise bolstering their security posture (55%), implementing AI-based self-service technology (50%), and upgrading existing IT infrastructure (40%).
