Over half (64%) of organizations plan to operate a multicloud environment within three years. However, the challenges of cloud security, data integration, and cost remain, according to Nutanix’s latest survey.

The vendor polled more than 1,700 IT decision makers globally for its fourth annual Enterprise Cloud Index to measure enterprise progress on cloud adoption. And it found organizations on average use 1.6 public clouds, up from 1.1 a year ago when more focus was on hybrid clouds.

“Organizations are increasingly leveraging multiple clouds to achieve the agility and flexibility they need to effectively compete as well as drive innovation into the market,” Monica Kumar, SVP of product and solutions at Nutanix, told SDxCentral.

The amount of data that enterprises have is huge, so “you're not going to have all of your enterprise data living in a single place — it's never gonna happen,” she added.

In addition, large enterprises are more advanced in the multicloud journey. The report found 57% of companies with 5,000 or more employees already deployed a multicloud strategy.

This shows that “one size does not fit all when it comes to deploying applications,” Kumar said. “Customers are choosing a cloud smart approach and choosing the right cloud for the right application.”

Despite more organizations moving toward multicloud, challenges remain in navigating the environment. Managing security, data integration, and cost across cloud borders were among the top multicloud challenges cited by respondents.

Enterprises continue to rank improving security posture as a top IT priority. In this year’s index, of the 91% of respondents that moved applications between infrastructures during the past year, 41% said they did so for security reasons. 

On top of security, the majority of respondents also agreed that succeeding with multicloud requires simpler management, and 83% of them said that the hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model to address the challenges.

Nutanix has been pushing the hybrid multicloud operating model. It “provides unified operations and management across private and public clouds,” Kumar explained, so the model enables customers to move data, applications, and licensees across on-premise and multiple cloud environments, and also to reuse common IT constructs, processes, and skillsets.

However, the vendor's multicloud support currently only extends from on-premises, private clouds to Amazon Web Services with Microsoft Azure support available in limited preview. And it plans to offer more choices in the future.

As it grows its hybrid multicloud technology, Nutanix wants to be the Airbnb of the hybrid cloud.

“What we are is a hybrid, multicloud platform company with security built in,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. “In some ways, we are like an Airbnb here. We have a platform, customers can come to our platform and use it and run in any cloud they want. And if you’re a cloud provider, you can come to us, use our platform and go capture those enterprise customer workloads.”

Nutanix’s index also showed that 91% of respondents said they have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last 12 months. However, 80% of them reported moving apps can be time consuming and costly, while 77% said that workload portability is a significant or moderate challenge.

After so many years of developing cloud computing, organizations are still dealing with a lot of complexity including multi-vendor, multi-location, multi-application, and multi-workload, Kumar pointed out. 

Kumar suggested starting with an application-centric approach for multicloud deployments.

“It's becoming clear to us that cloud is not a destination. It is an operating model,” she said. “It's a multicloud world out there. We believe a hybrid multicloud IT operating model is the best one to go with because one size of cloud doesn't fit all.”