To mitigate the impact of Covid-19, 63 per cent of India’s enterprises ramped up investments in hybrid cloud compared to just 46 per cent globally, revealed a new report from Nutanix Inc, a leader in private cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud computing.

As the pandemic swept across the globe, enterprises overnight turned to cloud infrastructure to accommodate workers who were forced to work remotely. The report shows that hybrid model was the model of choice in India as 97 per cent of respondents declared itas the correct architecture for their organisations, higher than the global average of 87 per cent.

New normal

Indian enterprises are viewing IT more strategically in their organisations. Organisations in India are also developing ambitious plans, with more than half (56 per cent) saying they plan to run an integrated hybrid environment within five years. Respondents also stated that traditional data center penetration will drop from 13 per cent to 3 per cent.

These insights come from the third annual Enterprise Cloud Index, which measures progress with adopting private, hybrid and public clouds, and this year, it explored the impact of Covid-19 on current and future IT decisions and strategy.

“Cloud infrastructure is now a critical component of IT infrastructure, as Indian enterprises branch further into investing in digitisation and look for secure alternatives for their workloads. Due to the pandemic, flexibility and security have emerged to be of utmost importance, and Indian enterprises need the ability to match workloads,” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, Managing Director, Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix.

“The untapped potential of hybrid cloud solutions is finally being recognised by Indian companies as they move away from legacy IT systems and adopt cloud solutions,” he said.

Key factors

The findings also highlight that while cost savings are a driver in deciding to modernise IT infrastructures, it is not the primary factor. Better control of IT resource usage (79 per cent), increased speed to meet business needs (69 per cent), and better support to customers (60 per cent) are the key factors to modernisation.

“India’s organisations have recognised that Covid-19 has accelerated us into a new era of strategic IT and raised its profile considerably. The report suggests that India is a front runner when it comes to modernising IT infrastructures as we begin our journey into a new normal,” added Balakrishnan.

India’s appetite for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is also mentioned in the report, with nearly three-fourths (72 per cent) stating that they have already deployed or are in the process of deploying HCI, compared to 50 per cent of global respondents.