Could you take us through some suggestions for CIOs planning to move to Cloud, and address typical barriers to adoption?
The cloud adoption problem could be seen from four areas—technology, people, and process. From the technology perspective, you have almost everything on the public cloud, right from IaaS to SaaS and PaaS. IaaS is something that is so essential for a CIO that cost becomes a very important function.
As CIOs are always under cost pressure in the current economic scenario, it is extremely important for CIOs that when they have compute-intensive workload they do a real TCO analysis–whether it will be really beneficial for them to just use lift and shift to move infrastructure /compute centric workloads to the cloud.
In the technology aspect, we need to be very clear about what kind of workload we are putting on cloud-first. Nutanix provides a single point of control for all applications and data, across all clouds. It helps in meeting cost, security, and SLA requirements.
As far as people are concerned, there must be a culture where siloes of compute network storage are essentially broken down vertically into horizontal portfolio like cloud architect, cloud infra architect, cloud app architect. The last part is the process part, where you have various ways of looking at certain applications. You could look at applications like learning management, HR management, etc which are on the edge and which can move to SaaS model because it removes the entire pain of management, and then you can look at the core applications and say that these should be part of the devops culture.
The fourth important part is governance. By governance, I mean not only cost but also compliance. If you have a great governance model than yes, you can look at the hybrid cloud model, the moment you have governance challenges than we have solutions which can help with those compliances.
In your opinion, are hybrid clouds the right model for enterprises already on a public cloud?
Organizations are increasingly looking at cloud in many ways. They try to take software as a service as an offering, they try to take infrastructure as a service–which is just the base compute, and they try to take platform as a service.
If you look at engaging customers with a better experience through AI, IoT, wearables, ML, some of those models. I think most of them are available on the public cloud. A lot of value is derived over the public cloud. The moment it comes to infrastructure as a service, one should evaluate the kind of workload he has. If it is just lift and shift, it doesn’t help and that’s where the hybrid cloud comes into the picture. There are many apps which have been built over time and run on business-critical pieces. The customers can continue to run the applications in the private cloud and Nutanix can help them automate the data centre and run it on a private cloud.
At any juncture, if the customer feels that the time is right, and they have the skill set to build cloud-native applications either by themselves or through their partners than Nutanix can be the layer that can help them move to the public cloud. If they feel that the experience on the public cloud is not that great and they want to move back of on-premise, we can help in that as well. App mobility is a very important aspect in the hybrid cloud.
Also, cloud interoperability is something very important. Today, if you want to move something to Azure, GC, AWS cloud, or any other cloud. We can also help in the same. More importantly can you interoperate between the clouds, can you bring something back on-premise, can you have a single pain of management for all those multi-cloud management, that is where we provide the value and that is exactly the promise of hybrid cloud services.
