India to lead world in hybrid cloud adoption

India is set to lead the world in hybrid cloud usage and adoption over the next two years according to a new global study by enterprise cloud computing leader, Nutanix, Inc.

The report, “The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index” compiled by Vanson Bourne, and commissioned by Nutanix found the adoption of hybrid cloud workloads in India will more than triple from 13% today to 43% in the coming twenty-four months.

This rapid adoption is likely to help boost India’s economic muscle as the economy reaps the benefits from enhanced productivity and efficiency, while the nation’s enterprises become more flexible and resilient. As Asia redefines its landscape in the light of the rapid onslaught of digital transformation – those nations equipped to maximise the potential from a fully connected economy will have a considerable advantage.

“This is great news for India’s enterprises and even greater news for India” said Sankalp Saxena, SVP and Managing Director – Operations, India, Nutanix. “Digital transformation is rapidly re-defining the regional and global landscape. As billions more people, places and things become connected to the internet, and more and more enterprises move their systems, software and processes to cloud providers, the need to connect, communicate, manage and align these varying components take on a new perspective. Hybrid infrastructure does all of these things and provides the key to truly unlock the full potential of cloud. By driving hybrid adoption, India’s enterprises look set to keep the country at the centre of the global economy.”

As enterprises pivot towards a hyper connected, always on, and digital environment, it’s becoming increasingly accepted that the promises of public cloud services will only be fully realized in a hybrid model – where public and private cloud environments of any type and size are fully integrated and interoperable.

This is where hybrid can add true value, providing enterprises with benefits such as greater workload flexibility, simplicity in processing big data, broader use of cross platform IT services, enhanced data security and compliance, dramatic cost reduction and greater business growth and RoI.

The report is Nutanix’s first annual index aimed at measuring the global state and adoption of traditional and next generation private, public and hybrid cloud*, including Indian enterprises.

The study identifies cloud experiences, priorities and trends of Indian enterprises and how they compare globally and in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region. The research found that India respondents use of private cloud ranked high and was surpassed only by Italy (49%), Germany (43%) and France (39%); however, the country trailed most of its global peers in hybrid cloud deployments with just 13% penetration, marginally ahead of France (11%) and the Nordics and the Netherlands with 12% respectively.

For India, the research suggests 91% of respondents agree cloud computing has increased the efficiency of their IT departments, 81% opine that mobility of applications between cloud environments is essential and 61% believe that having a simple way to move workloads from cloud to cloud and from cloud to on-premise infrastructure will solve a lot of problems.

Below are other key India findings of the report:

Further investments on time, money and skills on cloud services

Study findings reveal that India will convert much of its private cloud usage (38%) to hybrid usage, as its use of private clouds is expected to drop by about a third (23%) during the same period it expects its hybrid use to more than triple (43%)
While business and data security are key priorities, IT performance is a major benefit

Data security and compliance were ranked as the single biggest benefit of using a public cloud, on average, globally. These attributes tied with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) as the top perk when ranked by enterprises in the APJ region. India showed a higher ranking of security as a benefit than the global and APJ averages; however, it placed an even higher emphasis on performance, which it ranked as the number one public cloud benefit
India also seemed to value agility, scalability, and cost reduction less—and ease of management more—than its regional and global counterparts

Indian enterprises seem to fare better in controlling public cloud spend

While public cloud service deployments were reported to exceed IT budgets by 36% of both global and APJ respondents, only 23% of Indian respondents reported being over budget with their public cloud services; 77% reported being on or under budget.

Indian companies are doing better in getting all needs met by public cloud services

More than half of Indian respondents (54%) indicate that all their needs are being met by public cloud services —12% higher than the global average and 22% higher than the average in the APJ region.