Episode Details

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.

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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