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. 10 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
“
WHAT WE SEE
NOW IS AN
ADJUSTMENT TO
A MORE CENTRIST
POSITION:
PEOPLE WANT
CERTAIN IT
PLATFORMS TO
MATCH CERTAIN
USE CASES.
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 to something like
‘Get off my cloud, stay on it, choose
another cloud or, even better, enjoy a
combination of approaches. . . .’
34 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com