According to a study by Nutanix, the public sector will invest heavily in hybrid multi-cloud solutions, AI and ransomware protection in the coming years.

Nutanix has announced the results of its sixth annual Public Sector Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), which shows that public sector IT leaders expect hybrid multi-cloud deployments to quadruple over the next three years. Current industry adoption of hybrid multi-cloud is 57 percent, slightly below the 60 percent average in other industries.

Hybrid multi-cloud and security

The report shows that IT decision makers in the public sector are investing primarily in modernizing data centers to private clouds and maintaining freedom of choice in public clouds. The main drivers of these investments include ransomware prevention, IT modernization and AI strategies. The aim is to improve operational efficiency and access new opportunities.

The research also shows that the public sector is paying attention to regulations and compliance when storing user data. Hybrid multi-clouds offer solutions to simplify operations, improve security and privacy, and streamline data and application management. Hybrid multi-cloud adoption varies by industry. Education is leading the way, while national and local governments are lagging behind.

Increase in AI investments

Greg O’Connell, Sr. Director of Public Sector Sales at Nutanix, notes that 80 percent of the public sector plans to increase their investment in AI technology in the coming year. The report highlights that AI support ranks poorly as a purchasing criterion for infrastructure, but interest in the technology is high.

In addition, security and compliance were found to be the biggest drivers for application migration, with 92 percent of the public sector and 95 percent globally moving one or more applications to another IT environment in the last twelve months. This highlights the need for easy and flexible portability between different cloud environments.