Nutanix is significantly enhancing its cloud platform capabilities, accelerating its expansion in the sovereign cloud market. Its core objective is to help enterprises and public institutions ensure autonomy and security, and operate distributed infrastructure without relying on centralized environments. This update is particularly noteworthy as it is part of a migration bootstrapping strategy for VMware virtualization users.
In its latest release, Nutanix announced "Nutanix Cloud Platform 7.5," stating that the version includes over 160 new features. This release enables support for "dark sites" that can run independently in environments encompassing AI, cloud-native, and traditional workloads. This allows customers to build and operate their cloud completely autonomously without relying on external SaaS control panels.
The rise of AI has also fueled this trend towards stronger distributed architectures. This is because the need to process large-scale data locally, without migrating to a central cloud, is growing. Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Nutanix, explains, "If the concept of sovereignty in the past was limited to spatial separation, now it's being redefined around infrastructure operations and data resilience."
The most significant change in this update is that "Nutanix Central," previously only available as a SaaS platform, can now be installed and run in a customer-controlled environment. "Nutanix Data Lens," with its security, governance, and ransomware recovery capabilities, has also been fully made available with on-premises support, enabling cloud governance in closed network environments.
Public cloud connectivity has also been expanded. The company provides the "Nutanix Government Cloud Cluster" based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) specifically for U.S. federal agencies, and connectivity with Google Cloud is now widely available in 17 regions. In addition to additional regional support for Microsoft Azure and AWS, it is also compatible with OVHcloud's sovereign cloud in Europe.
In addition, Nutanix announced enhancements to software-defined networking, improved security for Kubernetes containers, and features designed specifically for AI workloads. The Kubernetes platform will now include a security image compliant with US federal security standards, and Nvidia's AI inference service has been integrated with government security requirements. Furthermore, compliance has been significantly improved through identity integration, access control, and detailed log tracing capabilities.
Disaster recovery and business continuity have also been enhanced. Prioritized recovery policies centered on critical workloads can now be set, and recovery accuracy is improved by maintaining security policies unchanged during recovery. The new automation tool, Nutanix Infrastructure Manager, simplifies deployment and lifecycle management and is becoming a core alternative attracting VMware users to migrate.
IDC Vice President Dave Pearson commented, "The need for sovereign cloud is becoming a critical issue for companies that need to address both compliance and operational consistency." Nutanix is offering customers a range of options to modernize their cloud operations, enabling them to maintain sovereignty while expanding into multi-cloud environments.
