Data sovereignty, cost and security considerations are driving Australian IT decision makers toward hybrid IT environments spanning public and private cloud data centers, new research reveals.
According to Nutanix’s 5th Global: Enterprise cloud index Data sovereignty is the number one driver of infrastructure decisions in Australia, according to the survey, with 15% of local respondents citing data sovereignty as the most important criterion when considering infrastructure investments.
Data sovereignty was one of the top three considerations for over a third (37%) of Australian businesses.
“Control and security are the top priorities for Australian organizations as they transform their IT infrastructure,” said Jim Steed, Managing Director, Nutanix Australia and New Zealand.
“The public cloud has long been viewed as a panacea, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that the cloud is a tool rather than a destination. However, Australian organizations are moving their most sensitive and business-critical workloads to domestic on-premises infrastructure.”
According to the survey, more than half of Australian organizations plan to move some applications from the public cloud back to on-premises data centers within the next 12 months due to data sovereignty concerns. This was higher than the global figure of 46%.
Also, 8% of Australian respondents are concerned with cost when making infrastructure decisions, compared to 5% globally. “The cloud bill shock is real. Hyperscale public his cloud his provider makes it easy to move apps and data into your environment, but it’s very costly to bring them out. ,” said Steed.
This year, more than half (53%) of Australian respondents said strengthening their security posture and meeting regulatory requirements was the top reason for moving applications between IT environments, up 15 percentage points from last year’s survey. .
Operating hybrid cloud and distributed IT environments is inherently complex, but this model will continue to take hold. According to the survey, an Australian respondent expects the use of hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure to increase more than five-fold from just 8% penetration today to 43% by 2026. .
Another study commissioned by Microsoft found that two-thirds of Australian organizations will be running cloud workloads in production in 2022, and public cloud spending in Australia will grow by 83% between 2022 and 2026. It turns out that it is expected.
However, to realize the benefits of hybrid multicloud, organizations must overcome challenges with data analytics and orchestration, cited by 44% of Australian respondents, and disaster recovery (43%).
Australian respondents said tools to provision, move, manage, monitor and secure applications and data from a single console would help them overcome these challenges and improve the efficiency of their hybrid IT environments. pointed out.
On the other hand, we are also concerned about the growing IT skills gap. Nearly 9 in 10 Australian respondents are concerned about hiring and retaining skilled IT and cloud talent in the next 12 months.
The main areas where organizations are expected to need additional talent are IT professionals with expertise in storage, computing and networking, cloud engineers and architects, and artificial intelligence and machine learning developers.
Accenture Australia’s managing director of cloud, infrastructure and engineering, Jonathan Taylor, said that while attracting and retaining cloud engineering and cloud architecture talent continues to be a challenge, companies are now not only focusing on customer experience, but also on cloud technology. I mentioned the fact that we are innovating in Core business processes also require a wider range of skills.
“It’s not just about technology and transformation. It’s also about understanding how to innovate and get really close to business problems,” says Taylor. “This is an interesting conundrum that in some ways aggravates the skills gap because we now have a much broader set of required skills.”
