The 2026 Enterprise Cloud Index, a survey of IT professionals, reveals tension between the need for IT oversight and the reality of easy-to-build-and-deploy containerized apps. Demand for AI capabilities is driving up shadow IT use, forcing IT teams to manage more risks. Get tech leader insights to move faster and smarter. Get more stories by subscribing to The Forecast. Podcast transcript: Jason Lopez:: This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I'm Jason Lopez. Nutanix released its eighth annual enterprise cloud index this month, and two of the key findings stood out. Containers are rapidly becoming the foundation of how modern applications are built and run, and Shadow AI is spreading through organizations largely unmanaged. We talked about this issue of Shadow AI with NAND Research chief analyst, Steve McDowell. Steve McDowell::You're like, "You know what? These IT guys, they're out of their mind. I need to use this because it's going to help me and I'm just going to pull the trigger and make the decision." Yeah, sure. The employee's getting a lot of benefit from this engagement, but you have no idea it's happening. I don't know where it's happening and I don't know what data's being exposed and where that data's going to. I think we see this kind of every big technology transition. Users are going to make their own decisions. Your employees are going to make their own decisions about the technology they use. It may or may not intersect with your corporate guidelines for IT. I remember when smartphones entered the world, that caused a lot of consternation among enterprise IT teams because how do I manage these devices? And they even coined a word, right? BYOD, bring your own device. That was a hot topic for several years until Apple came out with kind of enterprise management tools and things smoothed over. And CloudWorld kind of did the same thing a half a decade later. We're doing that now with AI. I mean, AI is so beneficial. Now, scrolling through LinkedIn and reading all the AI-generated slop, it's not clear everybody knows how to use it, but they're using it. [Related: AI’s Next Wave] Jason Lopez: The Enterprise Cloud Index is a snapshot of an industry in the middle of a profound transition, and it raises a question worth asking. What exactly is driving all of this and where does it lead? Dan Seruli has watched this transformation from the inside. As the cloud native product leader at Nutanix, he spends his days talking to organizations navigating this shift firsthand. Ken Kaplan, editor-in-chief of the forecast, interviewed him and asked him to step back and survey the arc of technology he's lived with for more than a decade. And what he's hearing now from the people on the front lines. Dan Ciruli: I think it is safe to say at this point that containers in general and Kubernetes in particular are, I'm going to say it out loud, the de facto standard for developing and deploying new applications. It is no longer something that is a science experiment, which it was eight years ago. It's no longer a viable option, which it might have been three or four years ago. I would say these days, building your application to be packaged in containers and deployed on Kubernetes is the defacto standard for how applications are being developed. And I'm pretty comfortable saying that out loud. Ken Kaplan: What are you seeing the success and struggles now in this new period compared to the early days? How have things changed? Dan Ciruli: One thing that people are wrestling with is that when it was in that phase that it was more of a science experiment or just some of the new applications, you had certain developers who would lean in and certain developers who were not affected by it. And now I think we're reaching the stage that everybody needs to be comfortable with it. Everybody needs to be ready for whatever application you're working on the next time they ask you for a thing like, "Okay, it better be packaged up in a container. We better have some Kubernetes running wherever it is. We need to deploy that application." In becoming the de facto standard, that has means we're no longer, there's a pocket of the organization who's doing in Kubernetes. Now we're in the phase that everybody needs to be comfortable talking about it, using it, deploying it, running things on it, SREing on it. Ken Kaplan: You're talking to more customers probably than ever before. You would like to talk to more. What are you learning from them? Dan Ciruli: One of the things we're trying to help our customers with is as they approach that transition is how they standardize. When you have pockets of people leaning into a technology, then you have pockets of people leaning into a technology and some might lean in a slightly different direction than others. Some people might be making a certain architectural choice, a certain security choice using a certain technology, which works for that team, but might not work for the organization as a whole. And as you adopt this technology wholesale across the organization, then you have to think about, well, how do we standardize? What policies do we want to set that apply to everybody? How do we centralize this so that this can be run by a centralized team rather than by individual teams? So it's a big transition. And as I say, it's become the de facto standard. And I say that with confidence, but for many organizations, they are still figuring out how that will affect them and how they, as an organization, do that in an efficient way that gives them the benefits that developers want, that give them the ability to innovate quickly, deploy frequently and scale as needed. Ken Kaplan: And do you see a correlation or it's similar to what happened with cloud and people could go out and use a credit card and get compute services for the first time. And then there was all these projects going on and IT didn't know about it. Do you see some similarities? Dan Ciruli: I had never thought about that way, and I think that is a fantastic way to look at it. Cloud was very much the same way. I was part of a team that we got frustrated with internal IT and the length of time it was taking them to get us literally just VMs and the amount they were going to charge us back. And we said, "Somebody on your corporate card, go to Amazon and start using this stuff." Yes. So I think Kubernetes started the same way where a team was like, "Hey, I don't want to deploy in VMs. I'm just going to start using Kubernetes." And then another team is. And then another team is, at some point, someone higher up and more central in the IT organization said, "Wait, there's way too much of this going on. This is not efficient. We've got different teams. We're spending too much money on this. We're duplicating effort all over the place. And from a security posture, we're at risk." So someone centrally said, "We need to, for all of those reasons, we need to centralize this. We need to standardize this and we need to do this in a way that does give the teams what they want, but does it in a way that doesn't put us at risk financially or from a security perspective?" That's an excellent analogy. [Related: Ecosystem Scorecards Help CIOs Avoid Vendor Lock-In] Ken Kaplan: Yeah. You hear about smart cloud strategy now. It used to be cloud first, now smart, but those people who have lived through that transition and are getting smart about their use of cloud, those are probably lessons that they can be applying to Kubernetes and containers. Why would the companies benefit now from saying, "That stuff's useful. Let's do it here together on this platform that can do the old and the new." Dan Ciruli: So the interesting thing about me saying very strongly, this is the defacto standard for how applications are written. That doesn't change history and it doesn't change the fact that at essentially every enterprise, they have decades worth of applications running in virtual machines that are for the most part going to stay in virtual machines. That isn't changing. And while the new stuff is all containerized, the old stuff was virtualized and will continue to be virtualized. Very few of those apps will be rewritten to be containerized, which means as you centralize operations for all of this, now you've got one IT team that is going to be for the next decade, two decades, responsible for running tons of VMs and a growing number of containers that some point will outnumber the VMs, but those VMs will still be there. Companies have a choice. They can build up two separate groups of people, pieces of hardware, networking strategies, security technologies to manage those, in which case they're building literal silos in data centers of which hardware can run which applications, building silos in their organizations of which people can work on which organizations and actually hampering integration. You might have a new application that needs to get an old database, old piece of data that is in a virtual machine. And if you're building those things entirely separately, that's a challenge every time you do it. Whereas companies that say, "Let's combine these on one." They allow themselves to run essentially any application. It doesn't matter if it's virtualized or containerized, you can run it in the same locations. It means the same people who work on running the infrastructu...

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