According to Nutanix Australia and New Zealand Managing Director Jim Steed, security remains both the main driver and challenge to achieving multicloud triumph in Australia, contributing to a 64% surge in investment into security systems in Australia. And while 92% named hybrid multicloud as the ideal IT operating environment, 27% of Australian organisations remain wedded to a single public cloud provider – compared with 16% globally – amplifying security concerns and limiting Australia’s cloud skillset development,

“Australia is in an interesting position on the global cloud field,” said Steed.

“On one hand, it’s a true multicloud leader, ahead of the pack on building tomorrow’s preferred IT environment. On the other, we see too many businesses wedded to one public cloud provider to manage their infrastructure. What happens when that provider has an outage? How can IT leaders manage sovereignty concerns when the vast majority of the market belongs to multinational providers? IT engineers also need variety, not myopia, in the cloud skillsets they develop.”

Survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they’re running business applications now and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities may change as a result.

Other key Australian findings from the report include:

• Apps on the move: Every Australian respondent has moved applications between IT environments in the past year, with a need to increase the speed of app development the primary reason. However, 83% said it was costly and time consuming.
• Full-time office all but gone: The 2021 report’s prediction that only 2% of staff would return full time to the office in 2022 is coming to fruition – only 3% of enterprises maintained a full-time office policy when restrictions permitted in the last year, and most organisations have between 50% and 100% of their staff working remotely.
• Top challenges in current IT infrastructure: 85% of Australian respondents said cost control was their biggest challenge; followed by data security, privacy, and compliance (74 percent); and the ability to support remote workers (73%).
• Australian IT teams better at staying within budget: While 24% of Australian respondents said they spent over their annual IT budget, this was well under the global average of 37% as IT spend continues to surge worldwide.
• Important skills still lagging: 82% of Australian organisations lack some of the internal IT skills required to meet business demands, with automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and containerisation the top skills businesses want to grow.
• IT’s organisational value continues to surge: In the last report, 78% of respondents saw IT as more strategic to the business – this has risen to 82% in this report as IT increasingly becomes an essential function to drive business activity in a more digital economy.

For the fourth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world in August and September 2021, with the respondent base spanning multiple industries and business sizes in Australia, other parts of Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

To learn more about the Australian report and findings, view the full global report, see here.