Eighty-six percent of companies consider hybrid cloud to be an ideal operating model, and they cite better agility and flexibility to deliver business requirements, support for remote customers and employees, and stronger data security, according to the latest findings Nutanix’s third annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report.

For three years running, concurrence with this finding has ranged from 85% to 91% of all global respondents. By contrast, the appeal of cost savings – which was the initial draw to cloud computing a dozen years ago – no longer drives the decision to move to a hybrid cloud model as only 27% of respondents cited it as a reason for switching IT operating models.

Nutanix partnered with independent research company Vanson Bourne to survey 3,400 global IT decision-makers from varying industries and business in mid-2020 about where they’re running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their cloud challenges are, and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities. 

Participants were also asked about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on current and future IT infrastructure decisions, and how IT strategy and priorities might be changing because of it. It is worth noting that, alongside Dell Technologies’ Digital Transformation Index, the Nutanix ECI report is one of the first global studies to measure business behavior as a result of the pandemic.  

“Flexibility is the difference between companies that are surviving through use of their technology right now in the pandemic, and those that are struggling,” Nutanix CIO Wendy Pfeiffer said. “And the survey results really kind of call that out.”

Nine months ago, most enterprises had network and computing resources concentrated around the hubs that we once called offices. Now we’ve gone into Pfeiffer called “network inside out mode,” where – yes, you’ve guess it – organizations have turned their networks inside out to allocate resources where they are most needed: at the edge, in individual locations, all over the country, and all over the world. 

“We have to be able to flex resources that might have been available in our hubs, available at the edge,” Pfeiffer said. “That flexible model – capacity from everywhere, the ability to run workloads anywhere – that's hybrid cloud.” 

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught organizations anything, it’s that they have no choice but to shift their gaze to the longer-term importance of IT initiatives along the path to cloud adoption. In fact, 76% of respondents reported the pandemic made them think more strategically about IT, and 46% of respondents said their investments in hybrid cloud have increased as a direct result of it.

Furthermore, Pfeiffer added that organizations are also prioritizing IT infrastructures that offer visibility and control. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said their primary motive for modifying their infrastructure was to get greater control of resources, and 55% cited meeting dynamic business requirements as the driver.

Underneath the covers, however, that hybrid cloud model doesn't work well without a common operating system to run, for example, a sales application the same way on-premises and in a data center in the U.S., or another data center internationally, or in a public cloud like Amazon or Google, she explained. 

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the seam that stitches it all together, providing organizations a common operating system to run on-premise hardware or in the public cloud, according to Nutanix. And the research findings back it up: Nearly all (92%) respondents that currently run on-premises infrastructure, or 72% of all respondents, have deployed or plan to deploy HCI. 

Additionally, 50% of respondents with on-premises infrastructure have deployed or are in the process of deploying HCI. And of those that have adopted hybrid cloud, that number soars to more than 69%, further substantiating that HCI is a strong underpinning of the hybrid model, the report states.  

Enthusiasm for the hybrid IT model has been strong for all three research years, but that gusto has not necessarily translated into deployments given that most businesses still struggle to fully adopt it, Pfeiffer said. 

The research indicates that still-maturing cloud management tools, scarcity of talent skilled in disparate cloud platforms, economic and regulatory trends, and the need to depreciate or transition legacy infrastructure are among the reasons for a laggard pace of hybrid cloud deployments. 

Together, these issues have conspired to keep hybrid cloud deployments fairly flat to date. Nevertheless, fairly flat is not stagnant, and organizations are making investments to move that dial forward. 

“Tools for managing mixed cloud environments to date have been immature or scarce,” the report says. “However, experts say that the supply side of hybrid cloud management tools is 'coming of age' in 2020, so significant improvements are likely to come.”

Moreover, while IT teams are short on in-house skills – with 37% of respondents citing their organizations lack the skills to manage hybrid cloud infrastructure, in part because different cloud technologies work differently – 85% said they’re investing in re-skilling their IT teams to keep pace with emerging technologies.

At the end of the day – and the pandemic – companies are trying to figure out how to achieve better business outcomes and support for customers. 

“You don't normally hear about a mode of technology or infrastructure consumption being directly related to how we support customers,” Pfeiffer explained. “Right now customer support is a real differentiator for businesses ... and what an opportunity to change how we show up to our customers and prospects online.”