Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 43 | Page 38

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 www.intelligentcio.com