The promise of cloud technologies has long been agility – a transformative ability to innovate rapidly, adapt to shifting demands, and drive business success.
By Sammy Zoghlami, senior vice-president for EMEA at Nutanix
Yet, for many enterprises, this remains elusive. Heavy investment in cloud infrastructure has not resolved key challenges such as fragmented data, siloed systems, and the difficulty of effectively operationalising AI. These barriers have left organisations in the business of peddling theoretical benefits rather than real-world outcomes.
But the beauty of technology lies in its ever-changing, evolving nature, which has given rise to the hybrid multicloud—a model positioned as the ‘game-changer’ that can bridge this gap. By enabling seamless data management across environments and aligning AI-driven innovation with strategic business goals, hybrid multicloud offers enterprises the opportunity to transform agility from an abstract concept into tangible results. This approach is not just timely but essential, as businesses increasingly rely on AI to remain competitive.
The Agility Challenge: Why Enterprises Are Still Stuck
Despite the hype (and success) surrounding cloud solutions, enterprises find it increasingly difficult to achieve the flexibility and responsiveness required to develop and deploy new workloads and even cloud-native environments and bring innovation into the business. A significant barrier is data fragmentation. For example, banks deploying fraud detection AI often find their data distributed across siloed systems, making real-time analytics impossible.
Similarly, many organisations approach AI as a science experiment, with isolated initiatives that fail to generate meaningful business impact. Another key challenge lies in addressing privacy concerns. While offering scalability, public cloud solutions often raise questions about data sovereignty and security. For enterprises handling sensitive customer information, this is a potential roadblock. It is the complexities and barriers found in siloed environments that stifle the very agility that businesses are hoping to achieve.
Hybrid Multicloud as the Foundation for Agility
Hybrid multicloud solutions provide a unified framework to address these challenges, creating an environment where data and workloads can flow seamlessly across public, private, and edge clouds. A critical feature of hybrid multicloud is its ability to enable real-time data access across environments. This eliminates silos, allowing AI models to operate efficiently and accurately.
Moreover, hybrid multicloud supports high-performance workloads such as natural language processing and deep learning without requiring costly specialised infrastructure. It also allows AI models to be trained in one environment and deployed in another, ensuring optimal performance and adaptability. By integrating and optimising resources, hybrid multicloud reduces the hidden costs often associated with fragmented architectures.
Through this cohesive approach, hybrid multicloud transforms agility from a theoretical concept into an operational reality, enabling businesses to accelerate innovation and scale AI initiatives effectively.
Real-World Applications and Use Cases
Hybrid multicloud’s potential is already being realised across industries. In the banking sector, real-time fraud detection systems rely on seamless integration between on-premises data centres and cloud-based AI models. This approach eliminates latency and enhances security. In government, hybrid strategies are the answer to deploying AI solutions while adhering to stringent privacy regulations.
Similarly, in manufacturing and healthcare, organisations are aggregating vast amounts of data, often across various devices and systems for predictive modelling, streamlining operations, and improving decision-making processes.
Overcoming the Integration Challenge
Integrating AI into existing infrastructures is, without a doubt, difficult. Organisations often face resistance to change and concerns over the cost and complexity of modernising legacy systems. Phased migration strategies – an approach where systems are incrementally transitioned to hybrid multicloud environments provide a viable solution as it helps minimise disruptions and maintain operational continuity.
This incremental approach to the hybrid multicloud also addresses another significant challenge: ensuring that existing investments in infrastructure are not rendered obsolete. By modernising systems gradually, organisations can extract maximum value from current technologies while building a more agile, future-ready foundation.
Additionally, phased migrations enable immediate benefits, such as improving the performance of targeted workloads or enhancing data integration capabilities, without requiring a full-scale overhaul. From an agility perspective, organisations can prioritise critical systems or workloads, test hybrid multicloud capabilities in isolated environments, and refine their approach based on real-world performance.
Beyond Infrastructure: Why Data is Key
Agility hinges on the seamless flow and utilisation of data. By unifying and consolidating data into a single, scalable fabric, organisations can unlock unprecedented operational efficiency and innovation levels. This starts with a robust data foundation – a strong data layer that is the bedrock for seamless AI operations. This layer facilitates the smooth integration of diverse data sources, enabling organisations to leverage AI/ML models effectively and gain valuable insights. If agility is to be achieved, eliminating data silos and fragmentation is paramount.
A unified data view empowers businesses with a single source of truth, fostering informed decision-making at all levels. This streamlined approach enhances agility by enabling faster responses to market changes, improved resource allocation, and the ability to adapt quickly to evolving customer demands.
Furthermore, ensuring data security and privacy is crucial. A robust hybrid strategy, combining on-premises and cloud-based solutions, provides the necessary safeguards while maintaining accessibility and enabling organisations to leverage the full potential of their data assets. Organisations can build a genuinely agile foundation by prioritising data unification, management, and security.
Embracing the Future of Agility
Hybrid multicloud is fast becoming the strategic foundation for AI-powered businesses. By breaking down data silos, fostering unprecedented scalability, and simplifying complex integrations, hybrid multicloud empowers organisations to unleash the true potential of AI and modern workloads. This isn’t just about technology; it’s about unlocking new levels of business agility, accelerating innovation, and gaining a decisive competitive advantage for your business.