Nutanix has announced the UK-specific findings of its fourth global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption. The research showed that more than half of UK respondents (53%) said that multicloud was their most commonly used IT environment, substantially more than the rest of the EMEA region and globally. Continuing this trend, 82% of UK respondents said they intend to be using multiple clouds in the next one to three years, with 21% already using three or more public clouds and 80% naming hybrid multicloud as the ideal operating model for their business. 

Survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they’re running business 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. 

Commenting on the findings, Alan Campbell, General Manager and Senior Sales Director, UK & Ireland at Nutanix said: “UK companies are leading the global pack in deploying multicloud environments that span a mix of private and public clouds, while acknowledging the potential hurdles with multicloud management, security and application mobility as they ramp up adoption.” He continued: “These concerns represent an urgency for cloud-agnostic tools that provide unified visibility, security and control of an entire hybrid multicloud infrastructure as the vast majority of UK businesses now cite this as the optimal operating model for their businesses.”

Key findings from this year’s report include: 

• Multicloud is the most deployed IT environment. The UK leads the way in terms of multicloud adoption, with more than half of UK respondents (53%) citing multicloud was their most commonly used IT environment. The only other country of the 14 surveyed with greater multicloud penetration was Brazil (54%).

In addition, far more UK respondents (82%) said they intend to be using multiple clouds in the next one to three years than global respondents (64%) and those in other EMEA countries (65%). Just over one in five (21%) UK respondents said they’re already using three or more public clouds, with more than a third (34%) expecting to be using three or more public clouds within the next three years.

• Application mobility is a cornerstone of multicloud strategies, with cost driving the movement in the UK. Adhering to a “cloud smart” approach of continuous workload optimisation requires enterprises to move apps among infrastructures as costs, IT resource demands, and business goals change. So it’s no surprise that most UK respondents (86%) said they have moved one or more applications to a different IT environment over the last 12 months. They cite cost as the biggest reason (44%), followed by security/compliance (37%) and capacity concerns (33%). Other respondent groups, by contrast, cited security and compliance most often as the impetus in relocating an application.

Despite the criticality of app mobility as a multicloud enabler, nearly all respondents from the UK (93%) agreed that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming; 80% of global and 81% of EMEA respondents agreed. These results indicate growing requirements for hybrid multicloud  tools that unify and, to a degree, automate processes across dissimilar cloud platforms. 

• Among UK multicloud challenges, cost is king. While multicloud adoption is rising, these are early days that give rise to some challenges. Far more UK respondents mentioned managing costs across multiple clouds as a concern (56%) than in other regions, with inter-cloud security and data integration being mentioned most often by other respondents. 

As hybrid multicloud tools continue to emerge that automatically discover cloud instances, compare costs, and alert IT with suggestions for changes that help cost-optimise their workloads, managing expenses across environments should become less of a multicloud concern. Accordingly, most respondents named hybrid multicloud as the ideal operating model for their businesses: 80% from the UK agreed, as did 83% globally and 81% across the EMEA region.

For the fourth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world in August and September 2021. The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region.