An overwhelming majority of enterprises across the globe feel a hybrid cloud is the right architecture for their organisations, reveals a new report by cloud computing company Nutanix.

According to the third annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report by Nutanix, 86% of enterprises surveyed consider hybrid cloud as their ideal operating model and have taken the initial key steps to establishing a hybrid cloud environment. These measures include adopting hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in their data centres and decommissioning non-cloud-enabled data centres in favour of private and public cloud usage.

Developing a hybrid cloud environment requires businesses to invest in both private and public clouds, which ultimately become integrated with common management and security policies and allow for application portability among them.

Respondents also reported running a mixed model of private cloud, public cloud, and traditional data centre more often than any other (26%), which signals to a likely stepping stone toward a fully integrated hybrid cloud environment.

Commissioned by Nutanix, the survey was conducted by U.K. researcher Vanson Bourne which took inputs from 3,400 IT decision-makers belonging to multiple industries and business sizes spread across Americas; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.

Vanson Bourne surveyed them about where they’re 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. They were also asked about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on current and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities might be changing because of it.

In the survey, San Jose, California based Nutanix said hybrid cloud deployments would increase by more than 37 percentage points over the next five years and anticipates a corresponding 15-point drop in non-cloud-enabled data centres.

Gaining greater control of IT resources, achieving the flexibility to meet dynamic business requirements, and improving support for customers and remote workers were found to be the primary motives for modifying IT infrastructures. Cost cutting was the driving reason for only a minority of respondents.

“Not everything translates into the new environment. And whether you’re re-platforming, lifting and shifting, or repurchasing [using SaaS], you still have to customise, move data, and integrate old and new worlds until you’re ready to let go. It’s a big deal, so you have to be very clear on the value of running in the new environment. I think these are some of the reasons many are foundering with deploying hybrid cloud,” a respondent said.

Enterprises running hybrid cloud environments are planning on making their organisation more agile and become more competitive as a result of COVID-19, compared to organisations using other deployment models. Additionally, they are also more likely to offer flexible work options and strengthen their business continuity plans because of the pandemic. This finding implies that a hybrid cloud infrastructure positions them more favourably to achieve these goals than other setups might.

More than three-fourths of respondents said COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in their organizations. Among those who use public clouds, 63% of respondents use two or more public clouds. Users of multicloud are expecting this number to jump to 71% in the next 12 months. This indicates that businesses are looking for the flexibility delivered by different public cloud providers.

The pandemic has forced companies to establish remote work infrastructures. IT teams have shifted their focus on to providing home workers with quick and secure access to corporate data resources with virtual desktops, virtual private networks (VPNs), and cloud services. In that respect, the pandemic has served as a catalyst to helping enterprises reach both their hybrid and digital transformation (DX) goals, as cloud services are often considered the cornerstone of DX initiatives.

Nearly 89% of respondents cited data security, privacy, and compliance are the major infrastructure challenges to the adoption of a hybrid cloud platform.