Aaron White, Regional Director – Middle East, Nutanix

Use of the cloud to handle IT workloads by education institutions is set to increase by 2020, bringing numerous benefits to the education sector in terms of efficiency, cost reductions and security management, according to the first ever global Enterprise Cloud index commissioned by Nutanix.

The study, which examined the education sector’s plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds*, 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 education institutions to benefit from advantages including improved scalability, lower total cost of operation and flexibility of workload applications.

The Enterprise Cloud Index – produced by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Nutanix – also revealed that in the education sector specifically, 32% of IT decision makers envision all of their applications will be working in a hybrid cloud environment within the next two years, mostly due to the flexibility offered by the hybrid cloud. 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”.

Aaron White, Regional Director, Middle East at Nutanix comments: “Educational institutions in the Middle East face serious challenges with their legacy IT infrastructure. With the continual growth in online testing, BYOD adoption, the increased need for mobility and remote access by faculty and students, and the surge in learning applications and instructional video — coupled with tighter budgets and more limited IT resources — the supporting IT infrastructure needs to be more adaptable than ever. Hyperconverged infrastructure is the perfect solution for colleges and universities. It provides the ideal combination of high performance, easy scalability, simple management, and low cost for server and desktop virtualization, and campus mobility initiatives.”

Other key findings of the report include:

• Middle East outpaces rest of the world in the deployment of hybrid cloud: The Middle East runs slightly fewer workloads in traditional data centres and outpaces the global and regional averages in its deployment of hybrid clouds, with 22% penetration reported as compared to the global average of 19% and EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) average of 17%
• 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.

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.

*For the purposes of this study, hybrid cloud “describes the combined use of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud service, with some degree of integration between the two cloud environments.”