EDITOR’S QUESTION
ANDREW BRINDED, VICE
PRESIDENT AND SALES
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
AT NUTANIX
Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A +
Multi-cloud deployment is becoming
a hugely popular IT strategy all
around the world for reasons
to do with flexibility, risk management
and maturity. In its best form, it offers a
smorgasbord of cloud computing assets
from applications to infrastructure in
a unified architecture with excellent
manageability from one console.
You need to think back to understand why
multi-cloud is so attractive. Ten or 15 years
ago, you might have heard people profess
‘there’s no way I’m risking security by
putting my data in the cloud’. Later, they
got religion and you heard people say: ‘from
now on, everything is going in the public
cloud’. What we see now is an adjustment to
a more centrist position: people want certain
IT platforms to match certain use cases.
That means if you have very important
intellectual property or highly sensitive
data, you might well want to keep that
behind your firewall in a private cloud with
very strict policies and protections. For
processes that don’t differentiate you from
your competitors, the public cloud works
very well.
So, what we see today is, in short, everything.
Most companies still have some on-premises
IT, most have some sort of public cloud
investment and most have an element of
private cloud. They will use SaaS, IaaS and
PaaS where they make sense and they are
increasingly seeking ways to make all of the
underlying services more easily manageable
and secure.
Again, if you study the history of IT this
should come as no surprise. Trends and
technologies emerge, but that’s rarely
the signal to get rid of everything that
you have. Thirty years ago, pundits were
saying the mainframe is a dinosaur that
would disappear because of client/server
architecture, but the mainframe is still here.
So, what we see is a hybrid approach where
multiple cloud platforms are deployed
but companies also maintain some IT
on premises and often in the facilities of
colocation providers and outsourcers. It’s
therefore incumbent on companies like
Nutanix to support all those models.
Having a variegated approach where
different categories of IT service run on
different platforms makes tactical sense.
It also means that CIOs avoid locking
themselves in to certain vendors and
platforms, giving them maximum bargaining
power and adaptability. In short, it provides
that most prized of modern business
qualities – agility.
I’m tempted to argue that if the Rolling
Stones were to re-record ‘Get Off My Cloud’
for the current IT generation, they might
have to call it something like ‘Get off
my cloud, stay on it, choose another
cloud or, even better, enjoy a combination
of approaches…’
“
WHAT WE SEE
NOW IS AN
ADJUSTMENT TO
A MORE CENTRIST
POSITION:
PEOPLE WANT
CERTAIN IT
PLATFORMS TO
MATCH CERTAIN
USE CASES.
28 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com