The public sector organizations have historically grappled with regulations that deter telework, the pandemic forced them to take necessary steps to securely support a remote workforce. Nearly half (48 percent) of global public sector respondents, said their organizations had no employees working remotely for one year. However, since the onset of the pandemic, the sector has scaled its number of remote workers, with only 15 percent of respondents reporting employing zero remote workers today. To effectively support this growing remote workforce, organizations have begun strategically evaluating their cloud models – with more than three-fourths (82 percent) of global public sector respondents identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model for their organization.

The finding of the third edition of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index Report which measures organizations’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds, point to a concentrated modernization effort throughout the sector over the past few months, with 70 percent of respondents saying COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in their organizations. This COVID-19-spurred push is especially notable, given that the public sector has struggled with IT modernization efforts.

“India’s public sector organizations are dealing with immensely high volumes of data daily, and as a result, simplicity and security assume utmost importance. This is why the hybrid cloud has emerged as the ideal IT environment for them- it offers a simple, scalable, secure infrastructure that can easily support heavy workloads during crucial periods,” said Ganesh Iyer, Business Leader, Government segment, Nutanix India. “We have been successful in translating this value to public sector undertakings across various projects and key initiatives, all of which are directed towards improving citizen services.”

Other key findings of this year’s report include:

Modernization is dependent on decommissioning legacy architectures: In 2019, 53 percent of global public sector organizations exclusively ran traditional, non-cloud-enabled datacenters. In 2020, that percentage dropped to 22 percent. Organizations are choosing to invest in private and public clouds instead, which will be integrated into a cohesively managed hybrid environment. Over the next five years, the public sector expects a 20-percentage-point drop in legacy datacenter installations and a substantial 43-point increase in hybrid cloud deployments.

Telework remains top-of-mind: 43 percent of public sector respondents reported a direct increase in their public cloud investments as a direct result of the pandemic – eight points higher than the global average. These moves likely reflect an effort to quickly provide for teleworking employees, as past restrictions made them less capable of providing work-from-home solutions than other industries. Moreover, most entities in this sector are planning to maintain support for telework, with only 4 percent planning to go back to their pre-pandemic approach.

 Public sector organizations are bullish on hybrid cloud: More than three-fourths (82 percent) of global public sector respondents identify hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model for their organization. They’re evolving their infrastructures to get there, with reported plans that call for doubling their hybrid cloud usage within one year and growing their deployments to about 56 percent penetration within five years, up from just under 13 percent penetration today.

Security plays a large factor in deployment decisions: Security is top of mind for public sector organizations. Public sector respondents identified security, privacy and compliance as the number one factor driving their deployment decisions. Similarly, the majority of respondents in this industry (59 percent) identified these same factors as the reason for moving applications back on-premises.

The 2020 respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.