Delivering better business results for CIOs

Businesses have long understood that simplifying and centralizing tasks can reduce costs, break down silos, and promote collaboration and consistency. However, despite its potential, cloud computing has not yet fully utilized these advantages to manage complex cloud environments.

Like finance, HR, and sales functions, organizations are looking to move to the cloud to solve resource limitations and secure services. However, business network computing is still facing similar challenges to achieve efficiency and simplicity, especially in the management of various cloud resources and improving data management.

To face increasing demand and complexity

CIOs manage a complex portfolio that includes data centers, enterprise applications, desktop computing, and mobile solutions, resulting in a proliferation of data-generating processes that require analysis. Enterprise IT is struggling to keep up with technology ceilings while ensuring security, compliance and cost control.

The rise of AI, especially emerging AI and AI/ML, adds more complexity and challenges around data privacy, autonomy, and governance. AI models rely on multiple databases across different domains, looking for AI-ready tools that are easy to use across the core and edge.

Market changes, consolidation, geopolitical events, and the pandemic have driven IT to provide data solutions of increasing complexity. Enterprise cloud computing, while enabling rapid deployment and scalability, has also introduced increasing operational costs and other challenges in managing various cloud services.

In an era of global technology skills shortages, CIOs report that finding specialized skills is becoming increasingly difficult and costly. Business analysts Gartner report that the time to hire a new employee has increased by 18%. And according to the latest Enterprise Cloud Index research related to hiring and retaining cloud talent, 80% of respondents identify IT and cloud talent hiring and retention concerns in their budgets.

Another concern is that many jobs that use a lot of public cloud resources can drive costs higher than expected, especially with data-intensive jobs. CIOs report that moving data between cloud providers often creates significant costs and technical problems, reducing cloud reliability. While consolidating applications in a single cloud provider can be helpful, configuring them between clouds takes time and often comes with hidden costs.

AI models are often developed in public clouds, but data is stored in data centers and at the edge. Safely and efficiently running AI operations in these environments remains a challenge for IT organizations.

A new hybrid cloud estate

These pressures drive CIOs to seek out and use technologies that reflect the diversity of their business needs. ECI’s 2023 report finds that more than half (59%) of businesses use more than one IT infrastructure, often made up of private and public cloud providers, multi-cloud providers, data received, and data centers available. Similarly, 12% of organizations use a combination of multiple cloud providers and private cloud, and 38% plan to adopt a hybrid cloud in the next year.

The challenge for CIOs is that without the right tools in place, this new hybrid cloud landscape can cloud the visibility of business intelligence leaders who need to measure performance and cost. Multiple tasks and data not placed in the most efficient hybrid cloud environment can consume resources that could be better used to drive business results.

Effective workload management in a hybrid cloud environment provides a competitive advantage, ensuring better business continuity, governance, operations, security and cost control.

A new way of working in the cloud

Increasing demand and increased choice require a new way of working. CIOs must address the challenges of a multi-cloud environment while ensuring effective data management, addressing skills shortages, and managing ongoing cost structures. Despite these challenges, businesses and IT must stay on top of things and respond to changing needs.

According to the ECI report, more than 90% of organizations see value in a unified operating platform. It allows businesses to manage processes and data centrally in a hybrid IT environment, setting the best practices for maximum efficiency. This platform works without technical differences in the infrastructure, providing a single place to manage all processes and data.

This situation prevents businesses from being locked into a single provider based on the required expertise or ability to change processes. Instead, applications are developed once and run on the most efficient systems, whether it’s a public or private cloud or the edge.

Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a unified stack for managing public, private and virtual environments. Working consistently across data centers, the edge, AWS, and Azure, it allows IT to expand into the public cloud, reduce migration times, ensure availability, and control costs.

Consolidating and simplifying IT operations is smart business. A multicloud hybrid provides the best value when organizations use the same business results strategies they use to improve sales, finance and logistics 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 a senior writer and thought leader for the information technology industry since 2016, specializing in SaaS, healthcare IT, cybersecurity, and quantum computing. He can be reached through his website: mtwriting.com.