Hybrid multicloud computing company Nutanix revealed in its global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report that healthcare organizations appear to be in the early phases of cloud adoption and are behind the cross-industry global counterparts.
ECI survey and research report which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption in the industry further stated that adoption is expected to jump from 27% to 51% in the next three years.
This is in line with the global trend of evolving to a multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds.
It highlights healthcare provider cloud plans, priorities, and experiences and includes comparisons of the healthcare industry’s multicloud activity with that of other markets and the global response base overall. The respondent base spanned various business sizes and the following geographies like the US, Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region.
Top multicloud challenges include integrating data across clouds (49%), managing costs (48%), and performance challenges with network overlays (45%). While multicloud adoption is trending upwards, most healthcare organizations are struggling with the reality of operating across multiple clouds, private and public. Given that more than 84% say they currently lack the IT skills required to meet business demands, simplifying operations is likely to be a key focus for many in the year ahead.
All healthcare organizations (100%) have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last 12 months, likely moving applications out of legacy three-tier environments and into private clouds given healthcare’s above-average private cloud and traditional datacenter penetration. Yet, 80% of respondents agree that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming. They cite security (48%) most often as the reason for the move, outpacing the global average (41%), followed by gaining control of the application (38%), and improving performance (36%).
Focus on business continuity and disaster recovery is helping to drive cloud adoption. Due to being a highly regulated industry, healthcare organizations have been slower to embrace the public cloud as a main component of their IT environments for security reasons. However, healthcare IT professionals indicated an intent to use public cloud services as supplemental IT infrastructure to which they can fail over for improved business continuity levels and disaster recovery setups (BC/DR).
Top healthcare IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include adopting 5G (47%) and AI/ML-based services (46%), and improving BC/DR (45%), and multicloud management (44%).
Multicloud is the dominant IT architecture in use worldwide, however, among healthcare ECI respondents, 30% say private cloud is their most common IT deployment model.
To address top challenges related to interoperability, security, cost and data integration, 90% agree that a hybrid multicloud model, an IT operating model with multiple clouds both private and public with interoperability between, is ideal.
“Multicloud is here to stay, but complexity and challenges remain as regulations drive many of healthcare organizations’ IT deployment decisions,” said Joseph Wolfgram, Healthcare CTO at Nutanix.
“Regardless of where they are in their multicloud journeys, evolution to a hybrid multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds with interoperability is underway and necessary for healthcare organizations to succeed.”
Commenting on the report, Faiz Shakir, Managing Director – Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix said, “Since the advent of the pandemic, healthcare has taken centre stage and the segment continues to evolve at a rapid pace. This is driving massive demand for innovative solutions that can cater to the needs of the healthcare IT team as well as the requirements of the patients. Therefore, the hybrid multicloud model emerges as an ideal solution to serve as the foundation for improved service and, eventually, improved health with a better telehealth experience.”
