When the pandemic first hit our shores, organisations of all shapes and sizes scrambled to enable remote work in the public cloud – cobbling together a hodgepodge of IT solutions to fix holes in the roof. However, their haste to make things work has created new challenges. From data sprawl to spiralling costs due to unfettered cloud use, business and IT leaders can agree that moving ahead with patchwork IT will only make things worse.
Thus, as businesses prepare to tackle headwinds in 2023 – ranging from macroeconomic uncertainties to growing inflationary pressures – they must reclaim control of their cloud infrastructure to successfully build robust, adaptive organisations and scale, while controlling costs.
IT infrastructures begin to unravel due to soaring costs and data sprawl
Is your organisation going over budget on cloud spending? You are not alone. Ninety-four percent of companies globally incurred higher costs than initially anticipated when using a public cloud service provider, and the figure is even higher at 96% in Singapore.
Wasted cloud spending is an ongoing issue for many enterprises and is becoming more severe as cloud costs rise. In fact, enterprises waste one-third of their budgets on underused or unused cloud resources, highlighting the sheer financial costs of cloud mismanagement among organizations.
Furthermore, data sprawl poses an increasing risk to businesses, especially as remote work continues to be the norm. Data sprawl happens when enterprises collect, process, and store vast amounts of data, making it harder for employees to keep track of their data, where it is located, and who has access.
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A simple analogy I often use is storing files in drawers and cabinets. Imagine if those drawers and cabinets were scattered around the building, and you had to go to a different floor whenever you needed to retrieve a file. In today's digital age, those files are spread across laptops, on-premises, cloud storage platforms, and more. As the sheer volume of data created, consumed, and stored continues to rise exponentially, enterprises are bound to run into issues with managing, governing, and securing their data efficiently.
Take back control with a hybrid multi-cloud strategy
The temptation would be to stick to the status quo and see how things play out. However, many of the technologies that saw us through the pandemic are no longer fit for purpose and will not support the ongoing proliferation of apps and databases that organisations are seeing.
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The more stress organisations put on these systems, the more their costs and liabilities escalate. The patchwork cannot hold indefinitely, and the failure to act will result in inevitable decline.
These days, the spread of apps and databases across multiple clouds and environments means that many organisations lack complete visibility of where everything resides and the capabilities to manage it. So as we dive deeper into the new year, it’s time to get practical and reclaim control of the situation, starting with the hybrid multi-cloud.
Hybrid multi-cloud is a cloud deployment model from which to rebalance apps and data. It enables visibility and easy management of their clouds, both public and private, setting up an organization with the flexibility it needs to tackle an uncertain future.
Getting ahead of the curve
In recent months, we have seen numerous organisations prioritise digital transformation and data centre modernisation – looking beyond their makeshift use of public cloud and databases during the pandemic to settle on a more permanent and stable solution.
One example is Straive, a Singapore-based content technology company that tapped into the hybrid multi-cloud to scale its operations thrice as quickly. By adopting Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS, they were able to move workloads from on-premises to the public cloud and vice-versa effortlessly. Furthermore, as their company continued to grow and scale rapidly, personnel could access the applications they needed to do their work more swiftly. This resulted in greater productivity and increased satisfaction, with employees feeling that IT is meeting their requirements proactively.
In neighbouring Malaysia, chemical manufacturing company Kaneka Group overhauled its inefficient and disparate legacy IT infrastructure in favour of a more simplified cloud infrastructure solution. This led to a 35% increase in productivity, and a 91% reduction in IT support needed, due to the reduced need for maintenance.
These and numerous other examples underscore the value for organisations in investing in a unified environment, ensuring visibility across all clouds, and leveraging automation. A strong foundation is critical in a world where external threats and general unpredictability abound. It is time to discard patchwork IT and find more permanent, scalable solutions that will stand the test of time.
Aaron White is the VP & GM APJ Sales at Nutanix
