Delivering better business outcomes for CIOs

Businesses have long understood that simplifying and centralizing operations can reduce costs, break down silos, and foster collaboration and sustainability. Yet, despite its potential, cloud computing has not fully leveraged these advantages in managing complex cloud environments.

Much like finance, HR, and sales functions, organizations aim to streamline cloud operations to address resource limitations and standardize services. However, enterprise cloud computing still faces similar challenges in achieving efficiency and simplicity, particularly in managing diverse cloud resources and optimizing data management.

Facing increasing demand and complexity

CIOs manage a complex portfolio spanning data centers, enterprise applications, edge computing, and mobile solutions, resulting in a surge of apps generating data that requires analysis. Enterprise IT struggles to keep up with siloed technologies while ensuring security, compliance, and cost management.

The rise of AI, particularly generative AI and AI/ML, adds further complexity with challenges around data privacy, sovereignty, and governance. AI models rely on vast datasets across various locations, demanding AI-ready infrastructure that’s easy to implement across core and edge.

Market shifts, mergers, geopolitical events, and the pandemic have further driven IT to deploy point solutions, increasing complexity. Enterprise cloud computing, while enabling fast deployment and scalability, has also introduced rising operational costs and additional challenges in managing diverse cloud services.

In an era of global technology skills shortages, CIOs report that finding specialized skills is becoming harder and more expensive. Business analysts Gartner reports that the time to recruit a new employee has increased by 18%. And according to the most recent Enterprise Cloud Index survey related to the recruitment and retention of cloud talent, 80% of respondents identify IT and cloud talent recruitment and retention a concern for their budgets.

Another concern is that application workloads using extensive public cloud resources can drive costs higher than expected, especially with data-intensive tasks. CIOs report that moving data between cloud providers often incurs significant costs and technical challenges, reducing the cloud’s promised agility. While consolidating applications on a single cloud provider can help, refactoring them between clouds is time-consuming and often comes with hidden costs.

AI models are often developed in the public cloud, but the data is stored in data centers and at the edge. Deploying AI workloads securely and efficiently across these locations remains a challenge for IT organizations.

New hybrid cloud estate

These pressures are driving CIOs to look for and deploy technology that reflects the diversity of their business needs. The 2023 ECI report finds that over half of businesses (59%) use more than one IT infrastructure, typically made up of private and public cloud providers, multiple cloud providers, hosted data centers, and on-premises data centers. Similarly, 12% of organizations use a mix of multiple cloud providers and private cloud, with 38% planning to adopt hybrid cloud next year.

The challenge for CIOs is that without the right tools in place, this new hybrid cloud estate can blur the visibility business technology leaders need to measure performance and costs. Workloads and data not positioned in the most efficient area of the hybrid cloud can consume resources that could be better utilized to drive business outcomes.

Effective workload management in a hybrid cloud environment provides a competitive edge, ensuring optimal business continuity, governance, performance, security, and cost management.

A new cloud operating model

Rising demand and increased choice require a new operational approach. CIOs must navigate the complexities of multiple cloud environments while ensuring effective data governance, coping with skills shortages, and managing evolving cost structures. Despite these challenges, businesses and IT must remain agile and responsive to changing demands.

According to the ECI report, over 90% of organizations see value in a unified operating platform. It allows businesses to centrally manage applications and data across a mixed IT environment, standardizing processes for greater efficiency. This platform works independently of technical differences within the infrastructure, providing a single place to manage all applications and data.

This standardization prevents businesses from being locked into one provider based on required skills or ability to refactor applications. Instead, applications are developed once and then run on the most effective infrastructure, whether that’s public or private cloud or at the edge.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a unified stack for managing public, private, and edge environments. Running consistently across data centers, edge, AWS, and Azure, it allows IT to extend to public clouds, reduce migration times, ensure availability, and control costs.

Centralizing and simplifying IT operations is smart business. A hybrid multicloud model delivers the most value when organizations apply the same business-outcome strategies they use to optimize sales, finance, and supply chain processes.

Learn about Nutanix’s AI platform, GPT-in-a-Box, and the latest IT industry trends in the 2024 Enterprise Cloud Index report.

Marcus Taylor has worked as an executive and thought leadership writer for the information technology industry since 2016, specializing in SaaS, healthcare IT, cybersecurity, and quantum computing. He is reachable through his website: mtwriting.com.