Respondents in a parochial survey were sounded out on which areas of IT were the focus of their enterprise cloud investments

In a Dec 2023 annual survey of 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers (with  a special focus on those in the public sector) around the world* about “enterprise progress with cloud adoption”, some trends were noted in the data.

Public sector survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they were running business and mission critical applications at the time of the survey, and where they planned to run them in the future.

The first trend noted among respondents who were IT leaders in the public sector was that they expected substantial near-term adoption of multiple IT operating models (87%), yet current usage (57%) was slightly behind the average compared to those of other industries (60%).

Second, 85% of respondents from public sector organizations (90% of all sectors) indicated agreement when prompted that their organizations “now embrace cloud-smart IT deployment strategies”. Also, 8% of respondents from all regions’ public sector organizations in the survey indicated using a hybrid multi-cloud approach.

Other findings

Third, respondents’ data showed a near-40% increase in cloud security incidents compared to a similar survey performed last year, with 61% of organizations reporting “significant disruptions”. Also:

    • 92% of respondents from the public sector group (95% globally) indicated they had moved one or more applications to a different IT environment in the past 12 months. The ramp-up of moving workloads to best support each application’s requirements was creating the need for simple and flexible inter-cloud portability. In particular, shifting security-related requirements were largely fueling the movement of applications.
    • 80% of respondents from the public sectors indicated they expected to increase their investments in AI technology in the next year. Some 32% indicated that those investment increases would be “significant”, while 33% also indicated that plans to integrate loud-native services (such as AI) was a reason that they had moved one or more application(s) to a different infrastructure during the past year.
    • When asked to name their number one data management challenge, the greatest percentage in the public sector identified complying with data storage/usage guidelines (19%) as the top factor. Increasingly, data storage strategies are driven by privacy regulations about where end user data can be stored, such as data sovereignty requirements.

According to Greg O’Connell, Senior Director (Sales, Public Sector), Nutanix, the firm that commissioned the survey: respondents from the public sector were “eager to modernize their IT infrastructure and lay the foundation to adopt new technologies to deliver better services and experiences for constituents. In fact, 80%… (expected) to increase their investments in AI technology in the next year.”

*The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies, including North and South America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region.