The global 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey from Nutanix shows that multicloud adoption as a primary IT operating model will increase from 39 percent to 67 percent globally, outpacing the global average.
In the report, public sector refers to respondents in worldwide federal, centralised, and local government; public education; and public healthcare organisations.
The global public education sub-sector reported the largest usage among all ECI respondents (69 percent), 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 percent 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 percent 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.”
More key findings
The report found that public sector organisations face multicloud challenges. These include securing their data across multiple clouds (49 percent), application mobility (47 percent), security (46 percent) and managing costs (45 percent).
Additionally, given that 86 percent of public education, and 87 percent 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 percent). 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 percent 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 percent). Those that did cited improving security and/or meeting regulatory requirements (33 percent), gaining control (31 percent), and performance (30 percent) as the top drivers.
Moreover, 76 percent agreed that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming, versus 80 percent 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 percent agreeing on difficulty of application mobility.
Top public sector IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include improving security posture (46 percent), storage (41 percent), 5G implementation (39 percent), and improving multicloud management (39 percent). 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 percent), implementing AI-based self-service technology (50 percent), and upgrading existing IT infrastructure (40 percent).