The market for hybrid cloud is set to grow by 39% over the next five years. According to the Third Annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, the hybrid cloud is the only IT model showing positive growth among financial company respondents.
The survey of over 3,400 IT decision-makers worldwide found that 43% of financial services companies plan to increase their investment in the private cloud over the next year, 10 percentage points higher than the global average. The report added that private cloud adoption is crucial to creating a modern hybrid cloud.
The report also found that financial services organizations ranked security, privacy, and compliance issues as the most concerning when running applications within public cloud solutions (62%). Respondents were less concerned with public cloud capacity (30%), showing that while public cloud has the capabilities to support IT infrastructures, the security of sensitive data is non-negotiable, and organizations are looking for alternative solutions.
The industry’s confidence in the private cloud seems to be increasing, with nearly 50% of financial sector respondents say they’ve either fully deployed hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or are in the process of doing so. Another 38% report they’ll deploy HCI within the next 12-24 months.
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The report said that this investment aligns directly with increased private cloud adoption, as HCI reduces the time it takes to build the software-defined, scalable infrastructure necessary to support the private cloud.
According to the report, financial services organizations are looking to optimize their cloud usage. The sector’s top motivations for modernizing its IT infrastructure are to gain greater control of IT resource usage (59%) and to gain the speed (58%) and flexibility needed (55%) to meet business requirements.
Cost is less of a factor, but 31% of respondents from the financial services sector rated cost savings as a higher driving force for cloud than the global average (27%).
More than a third of financial services respondents (36%) said they were short on skills needed to manage mixed private/public cloud environments, while 34% said they lacked expertise in cloud-native technologies and containers, including Kubernetes. These issues have contributed to organizational struggles to adopt the hybrid cloud fully.
“Historically, financial services organizations have explored public cloud offerings when decommissioning legacy datacenters,” said Tapan Mehta, Director, Industries Solution Marketing at Nutanix. “However, as the industry continues to place greater interest in data privacy and compliance issues, organizations are turning to the private cloud. This rapid increase in private cloud adoption serves as the basis for a hybrid cloud model, which is expected to become the industry norm over the next few years.”
