Nutanix announced the findings of its eighth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures global enterprise progress with cloud adoption. This year’s report looked closely at the challenges IT executives face as they navigate the rapid increase of AI use and the need for application and infrastructure modernisation in the enterprise.
The rapid rise of AI adoption in the enterprise over the last year is forcing a wave of infrastructure modernisation, as companies race to build and run applications more efficiently. In fact, containers have become a core component of the enterprise application strategy with the survey showing that 85% of respondents report that AI is accelerating their adoption of containers to improve speed, reliability, and scalability.
“The findings indicate organisations need enterprise-grade security, resilience, and portability as AI workloads can run anywhere,” said Lee Caswell, SVP, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix. “Organisations would also benefit from a common operating environment for virtual machines and containers that enables their IT leaders to scale AI confidently across hybrid environments.”
Key findings from this year’s report, based on survey responses, include:
- Organisational silos create new AI risks: While AI adoption is driving innovation, it is also introducing operational challenges. Eighty-two percent of respondents believe silos between business units and IT make it difficult to effectively execute technology initiatives, slowing deployment timelines and increasing complexity.
- Shadow IT is creating AI challenges: Seventy-nine percent of respondents encounter AI applications or agents being implemented by employees in non-IT functions. Eighty-seven percent believe unauthorised AI use introduces risk, including exposure of sensitive data and intellectual property. This highlights the need for closer collaboration between IT teams and business stakeholders to ensure AI deployments remain secure, compliant, and aligned with organisational goals.
- Agents unlock enormous potential for organisations: A majority of IT executives (61%) expect AI agents to enhance customer or employee experiences. Fifty-eight percent also anticipate that AI agents will improve productivity and efficiency. Additionally, some believe that AI agents can play a deeper role with 57% seeing potential for AI agents to create new products, services, or revenue streams.
- Data sovereignty is non-negotiable: For 80% of respondents, data sovereignty is a high priority when making infrastructure decisions including where to utilise containers. In fact, compliance obligations often drive organisations to keep data physically within the country where it was collected. More than half (57%) feel the need to run their infrastructure within a single country, whether on-premises or through a local cloud region, largely due to security or data protection concerns.
- Containers are the foundation of modern applications, with AI as the key driver: Organisations are turning to containers to support AI-enabled workloads and modern application development. Eighty-seven percent of respondents expect the use of containers for applications to increase over the next three years, while 83% say they are already building new applications in containers. Further, 85% of respondents believe AI is accelerating container adoption which highlights why enterprises need to evolve their infrastructure strategies to handle containerised workloads.
- The directive to deploy AI applications comes from the top, but infrastructure is not ready to fully support it: Fifty-nine percent of respondents anticipate that their organisation will have more than five AI-enabled applications in the next three years. Yet if their organisation needed to deploy AI workloads on-premises, 82% view their current infrastructure as not fully ready to support this.
“Across the Middle East and Africa, we’re seeing AI adoption move from experimentation to execution, but many organisations are trying to move faster than their infrastructure and operating models allow,” said Mohammad Abulhouf, VP & GM, Middle East & Africa at Nutanix. “The findings of this year’s Enterprise Cloud Index highlight a clear priority for the region: modernising platforms with containers while maintaining strong governance, data sovereignty, and security. To scale AI safely and confidently, organisations need a consistent, enterprise-grade foundation that brings IT and the business together across hybrid and multicloud environments.”
For the eighth consecutive year, Nutanix commissioned a global research study to assess the state of cloud adoption, containerisation, and GenAI application deployment. Conducted in November 2025 by Wakefield Research, the survey gathered responses from 1,600 cloud, IT, and engineering executives with at least a manager-level title. Respondents represent organisations with 500 or more employees across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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