For the study, Nutanix commissioned the market research company Vanson Bourne to find out from IT decision-makers where they run their business applications today and where they plan to do so in the future, what challenges they face when implementing their cloud environments and how their cloud initiatives compare to other IT projects and priorities. The market research company received responses from around 2,300 IT decision-makers from various industries - including 337 manufacturing companies. Companies of various sizes from North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and the Asia-Pacific region including Japan (APJ) were surveyed.

According to the recently published 'Enterprise Cloud Index' from Nutanix, the planned use of hybrid cloud in manufacturing in particular exceeds the global average for all industries. Currently, the use of hybrid clouds in the manufacturing industry has reached a market penetration of 19%, which is slightly above the global average. In addition, manufacturing companies plan to more than double their hybrid cloud deployments to 45% within two years, which would exceed the global average by four percent.

While 91% of survey respondents view hybrid cloud as an ideal IT model, the current global average for its adoption is 18.5% - a difference that is partly due to the challenges of transitioning to the hybrid cloud model. The manufacturing industry reports barriers to hybrid cloud adoption that are similar across the globe - including limitations in application mobility, data security/compliance, performance, management as well as IT skills shortages. Manufacturing companies report greater IT talent shortages than other industries in the areas of artificial intelligence/machine learning, hybrid cloud, blockchain and edge computing/Internet of Things.

Further results of the study

• 43% of manufacturing companies surveyed currently use a traditional data center as their primary IT infrastructure - slightly above the global average of 41%.

• 20% of manufacturing companies stated that they use a single cloud service - the global average is 12%. It appears that manufacturing companies are turning to the cloud as an alternative because they are dealing with legacy IT systems and cannot handle certain workloads on-premise.

• 56% of respondents said they run enterprise applications in a private cloud - which is seven percent higher than the global average.

• Public cloud users spend 26% of their annual IT budget on it - with this percentage expected to rise to 35% within two years. Most notable, however, is that more than a third (36%) of public cloud users said their spending exceeded budget.

• 34% of manufacturing companies saw security and compliance as the most important decision criterion, while the cross-industry figure was 31% globally.

The full study is available to download online.