Shifting Australia from cloud-first to cloud smart

In the mid-2010s, Australian organisations were falling over themselves to announce they were diving ‘all-in’ on cloud-first strategies.

Fast forward to 2023 and attitudes towards cloud infrastructure have drastically changed. Where just a few years ago IT leaders expected they would eventually run all workloads in either a private or public cloud exclusively, the reality shows that the future is mixed.

According to the fifth annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), the greatest growth area in Australia is in hybrid multicloud infrastructure — private infrastructure coupled with more than one public cloud. Study respondents expect to increase their use of this model more than fivefold from only 8% penetration today, to 43% penetration by 2026.

Complexity, cost and control

Why the rapid increase? There are three key reasons behind the shift from cloud-first to hybrid multicloud: complexity, cost and control.

Rearchitecting business-critical applications to run on the public cloud is easier said than done. The interdependencies and multiple databases that need to be taken into account have traditionally made the process far more complicated than the term ‘lift and shift’ would suggest.

Once an application has been refactored to run in the public cloud, the egress, IOPs and migration costs can quickly mount, leading to bill shock.

The level of control an organisation has over its business-critical applications and data can also be a concern, particularly when it comes to security measures and management over the jurisdiction in which data is held.

While some workloads and applications are perfectly suited to a particular public cloud, others are a better fit for a different hyperscaler and others still run best on private or on-prem clouds. It is the weaving together of these separate infrastructures — underpinned by the understanding that there is no ‘one size fits all’ — that is the hallmark of the modern hybrid multicloud strategy. In other words, it is now increasingly clear that the cloud should be seen as a tool and an operating model — not a destination.

Organisations today are looking to strike a better balance between using private clouds for more predictable apps and sensitive workloads, and the hyperscalers for variable, consumer-facing, ‘spiky’ apps.

This is why we’re seeing Australian businesses pull the pin on a single public cloud or cloud-first approach in the next 12 months. According to the latest ECI cited earlier, 53% of Australian organisations plan to repatriate workloads, which is slightly ahead of the global average of 46%. This tells us that a significant proportion of Australian businesses moved workloads into the cloud prematurely and are now seeking a better infrastructure fit for these applications.

Data sovereignty a concern

While cost and complexity could contribute to these decisions, it is the ‘control’ element of the equation that is having the biggest impact on Australian infrastructure decisions — specifically, control over where data is held. The same report found data sovereignty concerns were the top-ranked driver of infrastructure decision-making in Australia. More than a third (37%) of enterprises cited it as one of their top three considerations, and 15% marked it as their single most important criterion.

Data sovereignty is emerging as an issue for Australian organisations due to a combination of factors; there are growing privacy concerns, increasing data security regulations, and an uptick in cybercrime. Combined with more fluid workforces that are no longer tethered to central offices, organisations are increasingly asking: “where is my data and who has access to it”?

To get on top of this, organisations are seeking the ability to quickly move data and applications between different cloud environments as required — and Australian organisations are serious about it. All respondents in the latest ECI report had moved applications between infrastructures in the past 12 months. Improving their security posture and ability to meet regulatory requirements was cited as the most frequent reason for moving workloads.

Being able to keep your applications and data where they are best suited — whether that’s for cost control, performance, security or regulatory demands — is crucial. We live in an unpredictable world. It should be easy to move data and applications to the most secure and efficient cloud of choice — and it shouldn’t cost you the heavens to do it.

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