Increased adoption of cloud by education sector to rise

Muscat: Use of the cloud to handle IT workloads by education institutions is set to increase by 2020, bringing numerous benefits to the education sector in terms of efficiency, cost reductions and security management, according to the first ever global Enterprise Cloud index commissioned by Nutanix
The study, which examined the education sector’s plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds, found that 55 per cent of educational institutions’ workloads will be running in the cloud by 2020, compared to 38 per cent currently.
The results depict a future powered by ‘hyper-converged’ infrastructure, with education institutions to benefit from advantages including improved scalability, lower total cost of operation and flexibility of workload applications.
The Enterprise Cloud Index – produced by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Nutanix - also revealed that in the education sector specifically, 32 per cent of IT decision makers envision all of their applications will be working in a hybrid cloud environment within the next two years, mostly due to the flexibility offered by the hybrid cloud.
Overall, seven in ten (70 per cent) IT decision makers stated that the flexibility to choose the right cloud for each application is a major benefit of hybrid cloud. The findings also revealed that application mobility across any cloud is a top priority for 97 per cent of respondents – with 88 per cent of respondents saying it would “solve a lot of my problems”.
“Educational institutions in the Middle East face serious challenges with their legacy IT infrastructure. With the continual growth in online testing, BYOD adoption, the increased need for mobility and remote access by faculty and students, and the surge in learning applications and instructional video — coupled with tighter budgets and more limited IT resources — the supporting IT infrastructure needs to be more adaptable than ever," Aaron White, Regional Director, Middle East at Nutanix, said.
"Hyper-converged infrastructure is the perfect solution for colleges and universities. It provides the ideal combination of high performance, easy scalability, simple management, and low cost for server and desktop virtualisation, and campus mobility initiatives,” he added.
Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey IT decision makers about where they are running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, challenges in setting up their cloud environments and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities.
The survey resulted in approximately 2,300 respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.