Enterprise Cloud Index

Background and Research Goals

For the fourth consecutive year, Nutanix has commissioned research to learn about the state of global enterprise cloud deployments and adoption plans.

In August and September 2021, U.K. researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world about where they’re running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their cloud challenges are, and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities. Survey 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 because of it.

The 4th Annual ECI respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.

Overview: State of Cloud Deployments

As noted in the Key Findings section, the majority of respondent organizations (64%) expect to be operating in a multicloud environment as their most commonly used deployment model, one defined by the use of multiple clouds, whether private or public, within three years—up from 36% today. In 5,000+ employee enterprises, 56% say they’ve already adopted multicloud, and 80% plan to do so in the next one to three years. Why the increase in usage of multiple clouds? The top use cases respondents cite are application modernization (53%), disaster recovery (51%), integration with native cloud services such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) (49%), and test and development agility (49%).

Private cloud-only usage also rose during the past year, albeit slightly, from about 23% in 2020 to 25% in 2021. A quarter (25%) of respondents cited private cloud as their most commonly used deployment model, the highest percentage after multicloud (36%). Traditional, non-cloud-enabled datacenter deployments were next, with 22% penetration remaining, while only 16% of respondents say they run single public cloud-only environments as their most common model.

Additionally, more than a quarter of all respondents (27%) report currently using more than one public cloud. On average, enterprises use 1.6 public clouds, up from 1.1 a year ago. In the coming year, the percentage of respondents from organizations that don’t use any public clouds is expected to drop by more than half, with corresponding increases in the adoption of two or more clouds.