Retailers Are Bullish On Hybrid Cloud

Increasing customer expectations, digital transformation initiatives and data security requirements drive industry-wide innovation and increased need for hybrid cloud

Nutanix, Inc, announced the retail findings of its Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring retailers’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. The report revealed enterprise workloads are quickly moving off traditional data center infrastructure, dropping from 41% today to just 18% in two years’ time, as cloud usage accelerates. The retail industry has the second largest

penetration of hybrid cloud deployments at 21%; with 93% identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, outpacing the global average for other industries.

Needs of Clients and Retailers

Today’s consumer expects a seamless omnichannel shopping experience in store, online and through new avenues such as mobile, in-app or even smart TV purchases. At the same time, retailers need to gather, analyze and keep data secure. This pressure to keep ahead of customer expectations is driving retailers to deploy innovative IT practices faster than ever.

It may not be a surprise that retailers are also embracing public clouds more quickly than their counterparts in other industries, yet their control of public cloud spend is better than peers in other industries. With the seasonality of the retail industry and traffic bursts impacting workload needs throughout the year, retailers have experience in flexing workloads to the public cloud as demand requires.

The Survey

Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey more than 2,300 IT decision makers including 329 worldwide retailers about where they are 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. The survey included respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.

The bullish outlook for hybrid cloud adoption globally and across industries is reflective of an IT landscape growing increasingly automated and flexible enough that enterprises have the choice to buy, build, or rent their IT infrastructure resources based on application requirements. For retailers, having the flexibility to choose the right cloud for each application appeared most often as the benefit for deploying hybrid cloud (at 18%) followed closely by using cloud “on the fly” to support periods of high traffic loads.

Given the seasonality of business and variance of IT and network consumption needs throughout the year, retailers understand the need to keep IT flexible.

“Indian retailers are racing to redesign their IT infrastructure as they seek to redefine their businesses.” said Neville Vincent, VP A/NZ, ASEAN and India, Nutanix. “Customer service is now giving way to customer experience and it is technology (hybrid solutions) that is (are) driving the change. Infrastructure design has become a critical aspect of maximising the value of data and the customer journey. Traditional hardware is simply not fit for purpose - a fact that has not escaped the Industry.”