Tunde Abagun, sales lead for West, East and Central Africa at Nutanix, said conversations across African boardrooms are evolving from whether businesses should modernise their IT systems to how they can do so efficiently without creating operational complexity or escalating costs.

According to him, hybrid multicloud has now emerged as the dominant operating model for enterprises across Africa, including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, as organisations seek to balance private infrastructure, public cloud services, and emerging digital application platforms.

“Hybrid multicloud is no longer a transition phase. It has become the operating model,” Abagun said.

He noted that many organisations are grappling with growing operational fragmentation as they expand across multiple environments, leading to tool sprawl, inconsistent operations, and rising management overheads.

The situation, he explained, is particularly evident in African markets where businesses are balancing rapid digital adoption with infrastructure challenges such as inconsistent connectivity, power instability, and evolving regulatory requirements around data governance.

Abagun said the next phase of enterprise infrastructure would be driven by platform-based models capable of delivering operational consistency across environments.

According to him, enterprises are increasingly moving away from managing isolated infrastructure systems toward unified platforms that support traditional virtualised workloads, cloud-native applications, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven services within a single operational framework.

He explained that platform thinking shifts the focus from where workloads are hosted to how they are consistently managed, regardless of whether they operate on-premises or in public cloud environments.

“Today, companies must be able to support legacy applications, cloud-native services, and AI-driven workloads simultaneously,” he stated.

The Nutanix executive added that AI adoption is accelerating the need for more adaptable infrastructure as enterprises seek systems capable of handling GPU acceleration, large-scale data processing, and predictable performance environments without deploying entirely separate technology stacks.

Rather than building isolated AI infrastructure, he said organisations are looking to integrate AI capabilities into their existing operational platforms to reduce complexity and improve scalability.

Abagun further noted that Africa’s digital economy presents a unique opportunity for businesses to build inherently hybrid and portable infrastructure models because many organisations are modernising systems while simultaneously launching new digital services.

He said this gives African enterprises the flexibility to strategically adopt cloud services while retaining control over sensitive workloads and maintaining operational resilience amid changing economic and regulatory conditions.

According to him, the future of enterprise infrastructure will be defined less by where workloads are located and more by how seamlessly organisations can operate across different environments.

“The next phase of digital transformation in Africa will not be about choosing between environments, but about building platforms that simplify operations, reduce fragmentation, and enable organisations to operate consistently across all environments,” Abagun added.

Nutanix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has announced the financial services industry findings of its fifth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption.

The research reveals that mixed deployments among financial companies are at 64%, which is slightly ahead of the global average, and data security considerations drive many of the financial sector’s infrastructure investment and application mobility decisions.

This remarkable adoption rate in financial services reflects the highly competitive industry’s commitment to significantly enhance the customer experience, leveraging hybrid multicloud deployments to fuel digitalisation, advanced data capabilities, and modernise applications.

“Increased infrastructure diversity and a heightened emphasis on data storage, management, security, and cloud-native services are driving all IT professionals to seek hybrid operations that transcend private and public infrastructure. As evidenced by recent regulatory measures such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), operational resilience and concentration risk are additional driving factors to hybrid model adoption,”

said Ian Haynes, EMEA Field CTO, Nutanix.

“For cloud deployment models, the financial services industry has emerged as a frontrunner, surpassing many other sectors in embracing the hybrid multicloud approach.”

Key findings from this year’s report include:

• Hybrid multicloud adoption has accelerated and is expected to rise in financial services. The financial services industry has made significant progress in adopting cloud technology over the past year, with 64% of those surveyed using multiple IT environments – whether a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or on-premises and hosted private infrastructure.
• Cybersecurity is the biggest IT infrastructure driver. The financial sector and global respondents prioritised cybersecurity above all else. This is not surprising, given the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks and the critical role that IT plays in financial services organisations.
• Mixed environments create new challenges and demand for a single place to manage all workloads and data. Most ECI respondents agree that having a single platform to manage their diverse private and public infrastructures would be ideal. Among those from financial firms, 96% agreed. However, only 42% reported actually having that visibility. The visibility findings indicate a gap in capabilities, highlighting the need for integrated tools to improve hybrid IT operations. Without visibility, IT teams are unable to manage, secure, synchronise, or analyse what they cannot see.
• The overriding driver of application movement among ECI financial services firms in the past year was to improve data access speeds. All respondents in the financial sector (100%) indicated that they had moved applications between IT infrastructures in the past 12 months. Nearly half (49%) cited a desire to accelerate data access as a reason for the move. This driver was followed by aspirations to improve their companies’ security posture or better meet regulatory requirements and to gain the ability to integrate with cloud-native services, such as AI and machine learning.
• Cost factors remain a wild card. ECI respondents tend to be fickle in their attitudes toward IT cost, which seems to be inching downward on IT priority lists – falling to last on global respondents’ infrastructure criteria lists and tying for fourth in importance among financial companies. At the same time, most respondents rank controlling costs high on their list of challenges. For example, 87% of financial services respondents described cloud cost control as a challenge with managing their current IT infrastructures, and about a third said it was a significant one.

For the fifth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers around the world in December 2022 and January 2023.

This report is supplemental to the global 5th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index master report and focuses specifically on cloud deployments within the financial services industry.

It sheds light on the cloud plans, priorities, challenges, and experiences of IT professionals operating in this sector, offering valuable insights for comparison with global responses and other industries.

Gain a deeper understanding of the cloud deployment journey of financial services organisations and uncover key trends and benchmarks in this ever-evolving landscape.