Through Vincent vincent, Vice President South Pacific Asia, Nutanix

As companies prepare to reopen their offices, few are planning a complete return to the old way of doing things. From hybrid work and the “big resignation” to how organizations strategize and plan for the future, the currents of change are faster than ever.

The business planning process has always been difficult, but the past 20 months have shown our limitations. While companies have never been able to predict the future, it now appears more uncertain than ever.

As a result, building organizational resilience has become a primary consideration. In part, this means accepting that planning cycles of three to five years have, for many, lost their relevance.

Against this background, no piece of advice seems more appropriate than the great martial artist Bruce Lee’s call to “be water”. A fluid approach allows a business to evolve with change and overcome obstacles. Instead of developing fixed roadmaps, business leaders should assume from the start that their plans are susceptible to disruption and build flexibility into the process. The ability to withstand disruption is largely a case of having constructive options, and in this new digital world first, those options are largely based on the ability of technology to meet evolving business needs.

Just as being locked into a single course can weaken an organization, so can being locked into a single technological solution. Much has been said about the “journey to the cloud,” but throwing all of your eggs in the basket of a single public cloud provider comes with countless risks, chief among which is a lack of flexibility when needs change. This is commonly referred to as ‘cloud locking’.

Cloud lockdown is a growing concern as businesses seek to operate in public clouds. This happens when a business has committed too much to a single cloud provider, and then finds that when their needs change, the cost and complexity of moving data and workloads is much greater than expected. This is leading to the adoption of hybrid multicloud strategies that allow a business to use the best of every cloud while providing a degree of freedom and choice for their applications and data.

In other words, businesses embrace the cloud on their terms.

Hybrid multicloud and edge environments that integrate public and private cloud with on-premises services from different vendors are growing rapidly. Our latest study found that 86% of IT decision-makers see hybrid multicloud as their ideal operating model, with the hybrid market expected to reach nearly $ 98 billion by 2023.

There is a good reason for this. In uncertain times, an IT infrastructure that allows organizations to scale up or down, and choose a specific platform based on the environment they find themselves in, can mean the difference between flowing or swim.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a number of large companies pursue these more thoughtful and nuanced cloud strategies. A good example is Suncorp New Zealand.

Suncorp embarked on a digital transformation program before the pandemic struck, investing in a hybrid cloud architecture built with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure. With that model in place, he was able to seamlessly transfer his employees to fully remote work with just two days’ notice before the country went into lockdown.

WaterNSW is another organization that has reaped the benefits of the hybrid cloud, automating data collection from its network of more than 4,600 measurement gauges and sensing devices installed in the state’s waterways. As a result, he developed a WaterInsights portal to share real-time information on water quality, levels and flows with the community.

In these examples and many more, the common factor has been the removal of bottlenecks to allow businesses to flow – whether it is data from a network of IoT devices scattered across rivers and streams. Australian rivers, or allowing staff to work anywhere, anytime, and however they want.

By solving immediate challenges with a more flexible and cost-effective approach, these organizations have also placed themselves in a better position to face the future. In the natural world, fluidity and flexibility are both sources of strength and catalysts for survival. The worlds of business and IT are no different – so when there’s a disruption, prepare to be the water.