New Nutanix  data has revealed that while businesses globally see clear benefits of  the hybrid cloud model, respondents list scarcity of hybrid experts as a major obstacle to adoption, with 54% claiming talent retention is part of the problem.

According to Nutanix’  first annual global Enterprise Cloud Index organisations worldwide are hungry for hybrid cloud (91%) yet only 18% have that model today.

Other finding  from the study which surveyed 2,300 respondents  – including ANZ organisations –  include

  • Interoperability between cloud types was the main driver for hybrid cloud, outranking cost and security
  • 71% ranked data security and regulatory compliance as the top factor to determine where to put workloads

The findings also revealed that application mobility across any cloud is a top priority for 97% of respondents – with 88% of respondents saying it would “solve a lot of my problems.”

Additionally, the report found public cloud is not a panacea; IT decision makers ranked matching applications to the right cloud environment as a critical capability, and 35% of organisations using public clouds overspent their annual budget. When asked to rank the primary benefits of hybrid cloud, interoperability between cloud types (23%) and the ability to move applications back and forth between clouds (16%) outranked cost (6%) and security (5%) as the primary benefits.

Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey IT decision makers about where they are running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, challenges in setting up their cloud environments and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities.

The survey resulted in approximately 2,300 respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.

In roles centred on agility and digital transformation, IT teams understand that runtime environments for enterprise apps change constantly. Respondents indicated a need for greater orchestration and application mobility across cloud environments, as they seek flexibility to move apps to the “right” cloud on a more dynamic basis.

In addition, shadow IT practices that circumvent enterprise IT teams are posing a significant challenge to forecasting and controlling public cloud spend with well over half of respondents (57%) reporting one or more incidents of shadow IT