Modern workloads demand a hybrid cloud strategy built for speed, scale and seamless migration.

As enterprise infrastructure becomes more distributed and application demands escalate, hybrid cloud is no longer a future option, it’s a current necessity. The evolving complexity of IT environments, driven by AI, containerization and cloud-native applications, is shifting organizations away from static legacy systems toward more adaptive and outcome-driven platforms, according to Rachel Skaff (pictured, right), managing director for Americas channel and partner sales at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Nutanix’s Tarkan Maner and AWS’ Rachel Skaff talk to theCUBE about hybrid cloud.

“When you start to think about, what our customers are looking for, they’re looking for that business value,” Skaff said. “That’s the beauty of the AWS and Nutanix partnership, because we’re aligned on that converged infrastructure. We’re aligned on the customer platform and making sure our customers get what they want.”

Skaff and Tarkan Maner (left), chief commercial officer of Nutanix Inc., spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Nutanix .NEXT, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how hybrid cloud strategies, particularly through the AWS-Nutanix partnership, are enabling enterprises to modernize infrastructure, streamline migrations and support emerging workloads such as AI and containerized applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Hybrid cloud accelerates enterprise modernization and migration

As organizations confront mounting infrastructure complexity, hybrid cloud adoption is reshaping how they approach workload management, disaster recovery and application modernization. Migration is no longer viewed as a one-time lift-and-shift initiative, but rather as part of a broader modernization path that includes AI-readiness, cost optimization and workload flexibility, according to Skaff.

“I think that the first thing is, migrating to the cloud is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a business imperative,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about your disaster recovery workloads, you’re talking about exiting a data center, you want to move one small workload. You have to start.”

By leveraging a hybrid cloud model, companies can meet the needs of dynamic infrastructure requirements while mitigating the operational disruption traditionally associated with migration. Success lies in flexibility: starting small, aligning to business needs and expanding modernization over time.

“Getting all of those workloads over, whether it’s NC2 on AWS, that’s going to help you see around corners, because who knows where the technology’s going to go, even tomorrow,” Skaff continued. “By leveraging our platform and that partnership, it allows you to quickly migrate that, and then you can start to modernize those workloads.”

New product developments such as Nutanix’s container-native platform, AOS, were highlighted as key enablers of this evolution. The platform eliminates the need for hypervisors, supports microservices and integrates seamlessly with AWS bare-metal infrastructure. This shift is critical for supporting emerging workloads such as generative AI and end-user computing in Windows environments, Maner said.

“What that means is, AWS and Nutanix are even tighter partners now,” he explained. “You don’t have to have all the hypervisor stuff of the past, just bare metal with containers. You’re delivering phenomenal microservice-centric application deployment capabilities across multiple workloads.”

A shared commitment to operational excellence, customer-centric design and contextual workload intelligence underpins the partnership. Migration pathways and modernization blueprints have been jointly developed to guide customers at all stages, from data center exit to full AI-driven architecture, according to Maner.

“It’s not just modernizing the infrastructure or the app itself, but all the surrounding business elements,” he said. “That’s the reason we love this partnership, because AWS figured this out. They know the code, they know how to do this. They’ve been doing this for a long time. That’s why we’re super excited working with this.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT. Neither Nutanix Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE