Education sector to host over 50% of its workloads in the cloud by 2020

Nutanix-commissioned survey by Vanson Bourne reveals the education sector will benefit from increased security, decreased TCO and ease of management

Nutanix has announced the findings of its first ever global Enterprise Cloud Index, which included education institutions’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds*. The Index found that 55% of educational institutions’ workloads will be running in the cloud by 2020, compared to 38% currently. The results depict a future powered by hyperconverged infrastructure, with institutions in the education sector to benefit from advantages including improved scalability, lower total cost of operation and flexibility of workload applications.

The report also revealed that in the education sector specifically, 32% of IT decision makers envision all of their applications working in the hybrid cloud within the next 1-2 years, mostly due to the flexibility on offer with a hybrid cloud environment. Overall, seven in ten (70%) IT decision makers stated that the flexibility to choose the right cloud for each application is a major benefit of hybrid cloud. 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.”

One example of how hybrid cloud deployments really work in educational institutions comes from The University of Reading who – driven by the requirement to reduce and simplify IT infrastructure while making it cheaper, opening up computing power to all academics and freeing up time for the IT team – turned to Nutanix to build its own on-premise Reading Research Cloud.

While the public cloud could deliver the on-demand agility and self-service management it was after, the unpredictable workloads of the education sector meant it would be more expensive and potentially harder and more time consuming to manage, which is why the University looked to work with Nutanix. Running its workloads in a hybrid cloud environment provides a scalable, manageable and cost effective solution that benefits both the IT team as well as the researchers, teachers and students at The University of Reading.

Other key findings of the report include:

      •        Hybrid cloud better addresses business needs over single public cloud, including the price tag: 87% of respondents said that hybrid cloud was having a positive impact on their businesses, and more hybrid cloud users reported all their needs were being met (49%) compared to single public cloud users (37%).

      •        Security is top of mind for determining workloads: 71% of respondents surveyed for the report ranked data security and regulatory compliance as the top factor in determining where to provision workloads.

      •        App developers circumventing IT: 57% of respondents said developers are circumventing IT when it comes to deciding where applications run, putting the organisation at potential risk.

      •        Finding hybrid IT talent is difficult: With clear benefits to a hybrid model, respondents say scarcity of hybrid experts is a challenge.

      •        EMEA is expected to surpass the Americas with hybrid cloud adoption: U.K. businesses, in particular, plan to decrease data centre workloads by more than half in the next two years, and double use of hybrid clouds.

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.

To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index 2018”, here.