To overcome business disruption in 2022, be like water

By Neville Vincent, Vice President South Asia Pacific, Nutanix

As businesses prepare to reopen their offices, few anticipate a full return to the old way of doing things. From hybrid work, to the “Great Resignation”, down to the way organisations strategise and plan for the future, the currents of change are flowing faster than ever before.

The corporate planning process has always been difficult, but the past 20 months have highlighted our limitations. While businesses have never been able to predict the future, it now appears more uncertain than ever.

As a result, building organisational resilience has become a top consideration. In part, this means accepting that three to five-year planning cycles have, for many, lost their relevance.

In this context, no advice seems more fitting than the great martial artist Bruce Lee’s call to “be water”. A fluid approach enables a business to move with change and navigate obstacles. Instead of drawing up fixed roadmaps, business leaders need to assume from the outset that their plans are likely to be disrupted and build flexibility into the process. The ability to withstand disruption is largely a case of having constructive options, and in this new digital-first world, these options are largely predicated on the ability of technology to support ever-shifting business needs.

Just as being fixed on a single course can make an organisation fragile, so does being locked into a single technology solution. Much has been made of the “journey to the cloud” but throwing all your eggs into a single public cloud provider’s basket brings with it countless risks – chief among them a lack of flexibility when needs change. This is commonly referred to as “cloud lock-in”.

Cloud lock-in is a growing concern as companies look to operate in public clouds. This occurs when a business has over-committed to a single cloud vendor then finds that when their needs change, the cost and complexity of shifting data and workloads is far greater than anticipated. This is leading to the adoption of hybrid multicloud strategies that enable a business to make use of the best that each cloud has to offer while also providing a degree of freedom and choice for their applications and data.

In other words, businesses are adopting cloud on their terms.

Hybrid multicloud and edge environments that incorporate public and private cloud with on-premises services from different providers are growing fast. Our latest study found that 86 percent of IT decision makers see hybrid multicloud as their ideal operating model, with the hybrid market set to swell to nearly US$98 billion by 2023.

There’s good reason for this. In times of uncertainty, an IT infrastructure that enables organisations to scale up or down, and choose a specific platform according to the environment they find themselves in, can mean the difference between sinking or swimming.

In recent months we have seen a number of large companies pursue these more thoughtful, nuanced cloud strategies. One great example is Suncorp New Zealand.

Suncorp had been embarking on a digital transformation program before the pandemic struck, investing in a hybrid cloud architecture built with Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure. With this model in place, it was able to seamlessly shift its employees to fully remote work with just two days’ notice before the country went into lockdown.

WaterNSW is another organisation that has reaped the benefits of hybrid cloud, automating data collection from its network of more than 4,600 measurement gauges and sensing devices installed in waterways across the state. As a result, it has developed a WaterInsights Portal to share real-time insights on water quality, levels, and flow rates with the community.

In these and numerous other examples, the common factor has been the removal of bottlenecks to allow business to flow – whether that is data from a network of IoT devices dispersed across Australian rivers and waterways, or enabling staff to work from wherever, whenever, and however they want.

In solving immediate challenges through a more flexible, cost-effective approach, these organisations have also put themselves in a better position to tackle the future. In the natural world, fluidity and flexibility are both sources of strength and enablers of survival. The worlds of business and IT are no different – so when disruption strikes, set yourself up to be water.

By Neville Vincent, Vice President South Asia Pacific, Nutanix

As businesses prepare to reopen their offices, few anticipate a full return to the old way of doing things. From hybrid work, to the “Great Resignation”, down to the way organisations strategise and plan for the future, the currents of change are flowing faster than ever before.

The corporate planning process has always been difficult, but the past 20 months have highlighted our limitations. While businesses have never been able to predict the future, it now appears more uncertain than ever.

As a result, building organisational resilience has become a top consideration. In part, this means accepting that three to five-year planning cycles have, for many, lost their relevance.

In this context, no advice seems more fitting than the great martial artist Bruce Lee’s call to “be water”. A fluid approach enables a business to move with change and navigate obstacles. Instead of drawing up fixed roadmaps, business leaders need to assume from the outset that their plans are likely to be disrupted and build flexibility into the process. The ability to withstand disruption is largely a case of having constructive options, and in this new digital-first world, these options are largely predicated on the ability of technology to support ever-shifting business needs.

Just as being fixed on a single course can make an organisation fragile, so does being locked into a single technology solution. Much has been made of the “journey to the cloud” but throwing all your eggs into a single public cloud provider’s basket brings with it countless risks – chief among them a lack of flexibility when needs change. This is commonly referred to as “cloud lock-in”.

Cloud lock-in is a growing concern as companies look to operate in public clouds. This occurs when a business has over-committed to a single cloud vendor then finds that when their needs change, the cost and complexity of shifting data and workloads is far greater than anticipated. This is leading to the adoption of hybrid multicloud strategies that enable a business to make use of the best that each cloud has to offer while also providing a degree of freedom and choice for their applications and data.

In other words, businesses are adopting cloud on their terms.

Hybrid multicloud and edge environments that incorporate public and private cloud with on-premises services from different providers are growing fast. Our latest study found that 86 percent of IT decision makers see hybrid multicloud as their ideal operating model, with the hybrid market set to swell to nearly US$98 billion by 2023.

There’s good reason for this. In times of uncertainty, an IT infrastructure that enables organisations to scale up or down, and choose a specific platform according to the environment they find themselves in, can mean the difference between sinking or swimming.

In recent months we have seen a number of large companies pursue these more thoughtful, nuanced cloud strategies. One great example is Suncorp New Zealand.

Suncorp had been embarking on a digital transformation program before the pandemic struck, investing in a hybrid cloud architecture built with Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure. With this model in place, it was able to seamlessly shift its employees to fully remote work with just two days’ notice before the country went into lockdown.

WaterNSW is another organisation that has reaped the benefits of hybrid cloud, automating data collection from its network of more than 4,600 measurement gauges and sensing devices installed in waterways across the state. As a result, it has developed a WaterInsights Portal to share real-time insights on water quality, levels, and flow rates with the community.

In these and numerous other examples, the common factor has been the removal of bottlenecks to allow business to flow – whether that is data from a network of IoT devices dispersed across Australian rivers and waterways, or enabling staff to work from wherever, whenever, and however they want.

In solving immediate challenges through a more flexible, cost-effective approach, these organisations have also put themselves in a better position to tackle the future. In the natural world, fluidity and flexibility are both sources of strength and enablers of survival. The worlds of business and IT are no different – so when disruption strikes, set yourself up to be water.