Kathy Gibson reports from Pinnacle Tech Tour – Cloud computing was punted as the solution to any business and IT challenges – but has spawned new challenges of its own.

There was $26-billion in wasted cloud expenditure in 2021, explains Nutanix’s Gerhard Fourie. But customers could have saved up to 53% of just their spend on Azure – by employing Azure on Nutanix,

Meanwhile, cloud is driving a need to reskill people, with 42% of core skills expected to change. This is if companies are able to find skills at all, with 89% of IT managers unable to hire for cloud and security skills.

Nutanix simplifies cloud management by reducing hundreds of instances by 10-fold, reducing the skills requirements of the cloud.

Costly vendor lock-in is another massive issue with data transfer, applications transfer, human knowledge reskill, and resilience options all a problem for CIOs. Nutanix can help by offering the simple ability to move workloads between clouds within the same licence model.

Cloud delays have created some negative feelings towards cloud with migrating coming in as time-consuming and costly. Nutanix offers the fastest and lowest-risk way to migrate applications in the public cloud – and it’s up to 6-times faster too.

The IT landscape is complex – there are a myriad new risks facing CIOs and they have to adopt new cloud-native skill sets.

Nutanix provides the technology that lets data and apps live across the hybrid cloud by providing a common cloud platform that lets organisations rebalance the core.

Fourie points out that about half of all data will soon be created on the edge. So organisations need to ensure that their data sits in a place that is fit for purpose to prevent them from being among the 85% of workloads that will be sub-optimal.

The complexity doesn’t end in the datacentre, though: public cloud brings its own set of challenges.

To start with, app modernisation is hard, with app mapping, dependency and latency slowing the process.

People culture, skills and transformation is a new set of challenges: it’s hard to upskill existing teams, while external cloud skills are expensive and scarce.

The environment itself is complete – hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are complex, creating issues in running private and multiple public clouds with silo teams.

These business impacts translate into higher costs, unspent cloud credits, delayed innovation revenue, and additional risk, Fourie points out.

“Nutanix was built from day one to give customers the public cloud feel in the private cloud environment – retaining benefits include predictable costs, high performance, greater control, and data sovereignty.

However, public cloud is sometimes the right place to run a workload with the elasticity and flexibility that provides.

The Nutanix cloud platform architecture encompasses enterprise apps, modern apps, analytics with artificial intelligence/machine learning, databases, and desktops.

Nutanix Central includes Prism Central, cloud management and data governance, to manage files, objects and S3; Nutanix Data Services for K8s; Nutanix data base service; and GPT in a box.

This is underpinned by the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, including AOS, AHV and Flow, on N2C-Multicloud and native public clouds.

What’s vital for customers is the end-to-end visibility and management, Fourie adds.

“Why do customers win with Nutanix?” he asks. “It’s because we give them freedom of choice, one unified platform, the power of simplicity and customer delight.”