A global survey of 1,600 cloud, IT, and engineering executives released today found that 87% expect their organization’s reliance on containers for application deployment to increase over the next three years, and 83% report that they are already building new applications with containers.
A study conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Nutanix also found that 85% of respondents believe that artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating container adoption, and 59% said they expect their organization to have five or more AI-enabled applications in the next three years. However, 82% also indicated that their current IT infrastructure is not fully prepared to support these applications.
Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, said the study revealed that while AI is clearly driving further adoption of containers, the pace at which organizations are adopting these applications appears to be deliberate.
In general, IT organizations have historically always pursued a slow and steady approach to building and deploying emerging technologies. Despite its potential, AI applications are no exception.
For example, 58% of respondents expect AI agents to increase productivity and efficiency. Additionally, 57% believe AI agents could create new products, services, or revenue streams, and 61% expect AI agents to improve the customer or employee experience.
However, the research also reveals that there are significant challenges with AI that still need to be addressed. More than three-quarters (79%) said they have encountered an AI application or agent implemented by an employee in a department other than IT. 87% believe that misuse of AI poses risks such as leaking sensitive data or intellectual property.
Additionally, 82% say silos between business units and IT make it difficult to effectively execute technology initiatives, slowing implementation timelines and increasing complexity.
Finally, 80% of respondents say data sovereignty is a top priority when making infrastructure decisions, and well over 57% believe infrastructure should run within a single country, either in an on-premises IT environment or in a specific region for cloud services. Additionally, many organizations are now looking to better assess the total cost of tokens they need to spend when deploying AI applications in the cloud, Caswell said.
Of course, there will come a day when the number of containerized applications will exceed the number of legacy applications originally deployed in virtual machines. Nutanix claims a platform that allows IT teams to consolidate application deployments on virtual machines that isolate workloads.
As always, the challenge is to overcome the large amount of inertia that typically exists within an IT organization that tends to be disadvantageous to risk, especially when migrating applications from a platform where existing applications are perceived to be running within acceptable parameters.
Of course, there are many factors that can influence these decisions, not the least of which is the sudden increase in virtual machine licensing costs following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. However, regardless of the motivation, the fact remains that enterprise IT teams are not prone to making rash decisions, regardless of what class of applications is being deployed.
related
