GenAI Forces Enterprises to Rethink Security, Skills, and Infrastructure

/ AI, Cloud, Infrastructure, Security
GenAI Forces Enterprises to Rethink Security, Skills, and Infrastructure

The News:

Nutanix released the vertical findings from its 2025 Enterprise Cloud Index study, highlighting GenAI adoption trends across financial services, public sector, and healthcare. Results show broad enthusiasm for GenAI strategies, but also acute concerns around security, infrastructure readiness, and skills gaps. Read the full reports here.

Analysis

Application modernization is colliding with the GenAI wave. Nutanix found that nearly 90% of organizations have containerized at least some applications, while 94% agree their organization benefits from adopting cloud-native apps and containers. These numbers align with theCUBE Research data, which shows 76.8% of enterprises have already adopted GitOps practices and 50.9% report that over half of their workloads are containerized. Together, these findings point to containerization as the de facto foundation for AI-driven workloads.

GenAI Adoption Rising

Over 80% of organizations already have a GenAI strategy, with adoption strongest in customer support and productivity use cases today. Yet in financial services, 39% anticipate potential GenAI-related losses in the next 12 months, underscoring the uncertainty around ROI. This reflects a market still in the experimentation-to-production phase: theCUBE Research notes that 61.8% of developers are “very likely” to increase AI tool spend within a year, but scaling remains a core barrier. For developers, the implication is clear: while GenAI may speed automation, building guardrails and reliable pipelines is critical before promising business value.

Scaling GenAI in Production 

Healthcare respondents reported that 99% face challenges moving GenAI workloads from development to production, with integration into existing IT infrastructure as the top barrier. Public sector results show the same pattern, with 76% of IT leaders saying their infrastructure requires significant improvement. This dovetails with theCUBE Research finding that 53.4% of developers feel “very confident” in scaling peak loads, but only 42.8% report fully automated deployments. Developers have historically relied on piecemeal automation and inconsistent environments, practices that fall short when scaling GenAI. Future strategies will likely demand investment in hybrid and multicloud consistency to remove bottlenecks.

The Unsolved Challenge of People and Skills

Beyond infrastructure, 52% of organizations say they need IT training to support GenAI, and 48% say they must hire new talent. This echoes theCUBE Research’s observation that 27.5% of teams cite skill gaps as their biggest cloud-native challenge. Historically, developers picked up cloud and container skills organically, but GenAI introduces new complexity: model training, ethical AI practices, and data governance. The opportunity is significant (53% of respondents believe GenAI advancements will help them become AI experts) but closing the talent gap will be a prerequisite for long-term adoption.

Looking Ahead

The Nutanix findings confirm what the market is already signaling: GenAI is not a side project; it is reshaping infrastructure standards, developer roles, and enterprise security priorities. The convergence of containerization, observability, and AI requires enterprises to build not just scalable systems but secure, governed environments where AI can thrive.

For Nutanix, these results provide a roadmap for how its customers may prioritize investments, particularly in infrastructure modernization and security. For developers, the key takeaway is that GenAI success will not come from quick pilots but from sustained efforts in automation, compliance, and skills building. The future of cloud and AI will be defined not only by what enterprises adopt, but by how responsibly and effectively they operationalize it.

Author

  • Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.

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