Public sector leads on multicloud adoption

Multicloud is on the rise and is now the dominant IT architecture in use worldwide, and it’s also dominant across the public sector. In fact, the global public education sub-sector reported the largest usage among all ECI respondents (69%), with adoption nearly twice the global average. However, the complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for public sector organisations as 85% agreed that to succeed, their organisations 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 multicloud model, an IT operating model with multiple clouds both private and public with interoperability between, is ideal. 

“The evolution to a multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds is underway across the globe, with the public sector on the fast track,” said Chip George, VP of Public Sector at Nutanix. “This evolution requires a dedication to inherent, strong platform security to fully execute on the multicloud vision and extend capabilities from the core to the tactical edge. Public sector organisations must look to hybrid multicloud solutions that meet security requirements while delivering visibility, manageability, and consistent policy-enforcement coupled with tight cost control across environments.”

Public sector survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they’re running business and mission-critical applications now, and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities may change because of it. Key findings from this year’s report: 

Public sector organisations face multicloud challenges, including securing their data across multiple clouds (49%), application mobility (47%), security (46%) and managing costs (45%). Additionally, given that 86% of public education, and 87% of all global public sector organisations cited they lack some IT skills to meet current business demands, simplifying operations is likely to be a key focus for many in the year ahead. However, IT leaders are realising that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud, making hybrid multicloud ideal according to the majority of respondents (75%). This model will help address some of the key challenges of multicloud deployments by providing a unified cloud environment on which security and data governance policies can be applied uniformly.

Public sector organisations are optimistic about application mobility. Application mobility is a critical multicloud and cloud-smart optimisation enabler, and while 75% of public sector organisations moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last year, it’s well below the average across industries (91%). Those that did cited improving security and/or meeting regulatory requirements (33%), gaining control (31%), and performance (30%) as the top drivers. Moreover, 76% agreed that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming, versus 80% of all respondents across industries, indicating that application mobility is perceived to be slightly less problematic. Public education organisations, which are ahead of the multicloud curve, were even more optimistic with only 56% agreeing on difficulty of application mobility. 

Top public sector IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (46%), storage (41%), 5G implementation (39%), and improving multicloud 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%).