Nutanix Helps Public Sector Adopt Cloud Smart Strategy with Clusters on AWS GovCloud

Nutanix announced the Nutanix cloud platform now extends to AWS GovCloud, providing a unified cloud platform across Nutanix on-premises and bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud region. This new solution helps enable U.S. public sector organizations looking for the strengthened security posture offered by AWS GovCloud to adopt the same software stack, across their private and public clouds, providing the flexibility to choose the right cloud for each application. Additionally, Nutanix Clusters on AWS GovCloud and Flow Security Central have been added to the Nutanix Government Cloud Services Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Authorized product offering at the moderate security impact level.

The recent Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index shows that the U.S. Federal Government is especially bullish on hybrid cloud, with 87% of respondents identifying it as their ideal IT operating model. However, adoption has been slow with only 14% currently running it. This is not surprising as many of these organizations are struggling with transitioning legacy and mission critical applications to public cloud environments. Solutions like Nutanix Clusters on AWS GovCloud can help to simplify government organizations’ paths to a hybrid cloud environment, removing the need for re-architecting existing applications, and accelerating cloud adoption to enable their mission and deliver services to the public faster.

“U.S. Government agencies are looking for innovative solutions that deliver a cloud-smart strategy while breaking down the infrastructure silos between private and public clouds,” said Paul Nashawaty, Senior Analyst at ESG. “With the launch of Nutanix Clusters on AWS GovCloud, Federal and SLED IT teams can now manage their hybrid and multicloud environments as an elastic and single entity spanning on-premises and multiple public clouds. This enables them to accelerate the migration of their on-prem applications to AWS while keeping them in control of their data, performance, and availability. Government agencies can accelerate their cloud adoption and access rich cloud-services to improve their operations as well as significantly reduce costs.”

Nutanix Clusters allows customers to create, manage, and orchestrate their infrastructure and their applications across private and public clouds, all through a single user interface, with license portability across both environments. This removes the need for separate teams to manage each environment and also enables seamless app mobility across clouds. Customers can also take advantage of the Nutanix software stack on private and public cloud, including unstructured storage solution Files, application orchestration solution Calm, and database administration and automation solution Era.

Nutanix Clusters on AWS GovCloud enables:

• Simplified Cloud Adoption: Nutanix Clusters solves a significant pain point for public sector organizations on their cloud journey by providing a seamless way to move virtualized applications and data to the cloud. It enables mobility without needing to re-architect applications, something that can be extremely costly and time consuming. Initial set up is also very easy, allowing IT teams to create a hybrid cloud environment in less than one hour.
• Strengthened Security: Along with Nutanix Clusters, customers can leverage Flow Security Central, a centralized SaaS-based management plane delivering compliance monitoring, network visibility, and security operations across both Nutanix and public cloud environments, including AWS GovCloud.
• Cloud Cost Optimization: Nutanix can provide significant cost savings to customers through increased visibility and saving recommendations over their cloud spend. Beam, which is part of the FedRAMP Moderate authorized Nutanix Government Cloud Services, allows organizations to control their cloud spend by right-sizing their infrastructure, optimizing purchase plans, and automating manual tasks. This, along with the application mobility delivered by Nutanix Clusters, can help organizations take control of their cloud spend.
• Flexible Hybrid Cloud Solution: Unlike most hybrid cloud solutions on the market, which are managed offerings, Nutanix Clusters extends agencies’ on-premises datacenters, without the additional cost and constraints of a managed service. This provides greater control as well as more flexibility. It also gives customers the ability to leverage their existing portable Nutanix licenses on either on-premises or public cloud offering even greater flexibility.

Beyond helping organizations accelerate cloud adoption, customers can take advantage of cloud elasticity along with their Nutanix on-premises environments. Whether to increase capacity for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments, to leverage cloud capacity for disaster recovery to help ensure continued operations, or increase developer productivity with elastic self-service dev/test environments, customers will be able to seamlessly extend their Nutanix environments to AWS GovCloud and scale as needed. 

“We know Federal agencies are looking for solutions to help them implement their Cloud Smart strategies, but existing offerings either lack the necessary security or are cumbersome to deploy and manage,” said Chip George, VP, U.S. Public Sector Sales at Nutanix. “Nutanix Clusters on AWS GovCloud enables organizations to significantly accelerate their cloud adoption, without needing to re-architect mission critical applications that are necessary to the agency’s operations and mission, providing an easy path to a unified hybrid cloud environment.”

Nutanix Clusters on AWS GovCloud is currently available to customers. More information on this solution is available here.