CIOopinion
OPINION
“
I BELIEVE THAT
THE CURRENT PANDEMIC
IS AN EVENT THAT WILL
SEE A SIGNIFICANT TILT
TOWARDS BROADER
CLOUD ADOPTION.
Andrew Brinded, Vice President and Sales Chief Operating
Officer, Nutanix
Six reasons why
COVID-19 will accelerate
the rush to cloud
Andrew Brinded, Vice
President and Sales Chief
Operating Officer, Nutanix,
says cloud provides the
enabling deployment model for
the times in which we live and
its impact is set to grow.
In 1991, the renowned technology
journalist Stewart Alsop made
a famously wrong forecast. “I
predict that the last mainframe will be
unplugged on March 15 1996,” he wrote.
But 23 years later, the mainframe is still
going strong.
For me, this underlines why it’s a myth
that IT is a fast-moving sector in which
revolutionary changes occur at lightning
speed. The R&D side of tech is certainly
dynamic and often disruptive, but
because of technological complexity, cost
of change, procurement, security,
management inertia and myriad other
factors, major changes usually roll out
slowly, over years or even decades.
Even smaller changes can take time to hit
the mainstream: think about how long it
took for smartphones or laptops to enter
it. In IT as elsewhere, there will always be
early adopters, but there will also always
be laggards.
Cloud computing is the biggest IT
shift since client/server but, despite
its manifest advantages and soaring
popularity, cloud has far from dominated
the way that firms deploy IT resources.
Most established companies still maintain
on-premises applications, data and other
resources and the trend is very much to
hybrid environments where enterprises
spread the load across traditional onpremises
IT, private cloud, public cloud,
38 INTELLIGENTCIO
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