Shifting business priorities – What customers see as challenges today
The issues keeping customers up at night have changed dramatically. Where two years ago, organisations were scrambling to ensure customer retention in unprecedented times, now we are faced with a different set of challenges, which, while more tangible, are no easier to manage.
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Preparing for a recession
Investors, bankers, analysts, and entrepreneurs have been hinting at a recession for months, but are now joined by the World Bank whose recent global economic forecast said “most countries should begin preparing for a recession”.?To this end, the report clearly states that rate of global growth is expected to slow from 5.7% in 2021 to 2.9% in 2022.
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To prepare for a recession, customers need to do more with less. Shrinking budgets will result in less available funding to support new technology projects and fewer people resources to help run systems. But shrinking budgets do not translate to curtailing innovation. The wheels of progress need to continue, so instead, we urge customers to look for technologies that provide efficiency gains, cost less to deploy, and have a much higher return on investment.
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At Nutanix, we have seen an upswing in demand for automation. The one-click concept we strive for, and the fact that our customers keep telling us we give them their weekends back, are all part of this drive towards automating tasks and, in turn, reducing technology and skills-intensive overheads.
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This all speaks to the fact that for a business to prepare for a recession, they need to build a cash reserve, safeguard it, examine and evaluate operating costs, and ultimately cut back where it can - without impacting customer satisfaction or eroding the business.
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Security
Cybercrime is a pandemic on its own and is getting worse, making it a key priority for our customers. And rightly so when you consider that Cybersecurity Ventures says global cybercrime damages are predicted to cost up to $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Add to this that the FBI believes that only 10%-12% of cybercrime is reported – and the figures get even more terrifying.
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Our customers are exceptionally nervous about cyber-attacks, and rightly so. While we aren't a security vendor, we still work with customers to help them understand where they can apply a zero-trust philosophy to their security posture. When deploying a cloud environment, whether it's private or public, you need a security-hardened platform that supports security auditing and reporting and protects you from network threats.
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The attack surface is growing, and adding a hybrid workforce and all the devices at their disposal exacerbate this. You can have all the security in the world, but it will fail unless you secure the development lifecycle, perform platform hardening and automation, and embrace microsegmentation. The good news is that the cost of all three supporting technologies, especially microsegmentation, has reduced dramatically, enabling you to isolate a security risk and reduce its impact.
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Skills Shortage
The current skill shortage is a global phenomenon, and customers don't have the number of people they need to solve complex business and technology problems. When you couple the fact that skills are scarce with the size of teams shrinking because of economic pressure, the bottom line is that innovation will come under threat.
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The fewer skills there are in an area, the more expensive that skill becomes, making it near impossible for businesses to afford an expert on every aspect of their infrastructure. The solution is adopting simpler technologies that enable customers to deploy large technology estates without relying on literal armies of IT experts to manage them.
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Sustainability
Across Europe, we are seeing companies developing a sustainability agenda. Not just to strive toward carbon neutrality but also to get ahead of the rising energy costs. Some of the Nutanix customers have revealed that in the last year alone, they have seen an increase of more than 60% in energy costs in their data centre alone – which is driving a refocus towards the reduction in energy spend
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Central to these sustainability plans is a shift in responsibility. Let me explain. In the past, the energy bill was the responsibility of the facilities manager; now, it is becoming the responsibility of the divisions requiring the most energy – IT is a big player. The quickest way to reduce energy consumption is to use systems and technologies that require less energy – that's sound logic.
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Because we can help a customer divide these costs by up to half of what they were using legacy technologies in the data centre, we are being granted a place at the sustainability decision-making table of many clients.
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Hybrid work
The pandemic sent people racing home, laptops under their arms, office chairs in tow and the business world shifted to lounges and home offices around the globe. But the concept of hybrid and mobile work was not a new one. Collaboration tools have been in play for over a decade as companies support workforce mobility and fluidity.
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It was, however, the catalyst that made the work from anywhere concept a reality as employees proved to businesses that they could keep the lights on while working at home. But the sheer volume of mobile users and mobile end-user computing deployments mushroomed, and the pressure was on the network, the data centre, and cloud deployments.
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The result? Companies have kicked to touch legacy environments that don't support hybrid work, are looking for infrastructure that can scale, and are opting for hybrid clouds where they can still ringfence specific workloads in a private cloud. For a vendor like us, the opportunity is to give clients the flexibility they need to deploy as they need, scale when required, and only cost as much as they can afford.
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Looking beyond today