Healthcare Industry is in nascent stages of multicloud adoption: Report

Healthcare organisations are in the early phases of cloud adoption and are behind the cross-industry global counterparts, stated a study by Nutanix. The healthcare industry is highly regulated and has likely been slower to embrace the public cloud as a bonafide component of their IT environments for security and privacy reasons, it said.

The study pointed out that the “adoption is expected to jump from 27% to 51% in the next three years, in line with the global trend of evolving to a multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds.”

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 organisations 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. However, IT leaders are realising that there is no one-size fits all approach to the cloud, making hybrid multicloud ideal according to the majority of respondents.

All healthcare organisations (100%) have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last one year, likely moving applications out of legacy three-tier environments and into private clouds given healthcare’s above-average private cloud and traditional datacentre 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%). 

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%). Healthcare respondents also said that the Covid-19 pandemic has spurred them to increase their IT spending in certain areas such as bolstering security posture (62%), implementing AI-based self-service technology (60%), and upgrading existing IT infrastructure (48%).