Operating IT infrastructure from Spain is one of the main conclusions drawn from the global research report Enterprise Cloud Index(ECI) made by Nutanix. The study, which analyzes the progress of companies in cloud adoption, also states that containers have established themselves as a central element of enterprise application strategy. In fact, 93% of Spanish companies (eight points above the global average) say that AI is significantly accelerating the adoption of containers.
“This eighth edition of our ECI 2026 study highlights the numerous challenges faced by IT managers in Spain in the face of the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and the growing need to modernize applications and infrastructure in the business environment”says Jorge Vázquez, CEO of Nutanix Iberia.
IT infrastructure and other aspects
The main conclusions of the report are the following:
- Spanish companies are promoting the use of containers to run applications with AIespecially due to pressure to strengthen data security and portability. 93% of IT managers in Spain expect the level of application containerization in their organization to increase over the next three years. Additionally, for 54%, AI readiness and enablement, that is, the ability to deploy AI workloads, is the main reason for adopting or increasing the use of containers in the next 12 months. This figure contrasts with the global trend, where the main motivation is performance (47%), understood as improving speed, reliability or scalability.
- The IT departments of Spanish companies have difficulties controlling how AI applications are implemented. The majority of IT managers in Spain (74%) consider that the use of AI tools and agents outside official supervision channels generates significant risks for the business, which is significantly lower than the global average (87%). This perception is based on experience, since 89% claim to have encountered AI applications or agents installed by employees in non-technological areas, a percentage much higher than the global average (79%).
- “Invisible” technologies (shadow IT) spread more easily when business units operate in silos. The use of hardware, software, applications or services without the authorization, knowledge or supervision of technology departments is also a challenge for Spanish companies. 82% of IT managers in Spain believe that the lack of collaboration between different business areas and the IT department hinders the overall performance of the organization and its ability to efficiently execute technological initiatives.
- Many Spanish companies are betting on a hybrid approach to storage, with special emphasis on data sovereignty. 90% of managers in Spain consider data sovereignty an essential requirement in infrastructure decisions, being well above their counterparts globally (80%). Additionally, 62% state that they need to operate their infrastructure within a single country (that is, in national territory), either in environments on-premise or in a region cloud local, due to security or data protection concerns. In Spain, companies run their containerized applications in a very balanced way between the public cloud (63%) and on-premises environments or private clouds (52%).
