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Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has released the results of its global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research study, which assesses how far businesses have progressed with cloud adoption. According to the study, healthcare organisations appear to be in the early stages of cloud adoption, lagging behind the global respondent average across industries. In the next three years, however, adoption is predicted to rise from 27% to 51%, in keeping with the global trend of moving to a multicloud IT architecture that includes both private and public clouds.
Although multicloud is the most popular IT architecture worldwide, 30% of healthcare ECI respondents indicate private cloud is their preferred IT deployment type. For security and privacy reasons, the healthcare industry has likely been slower to accept the public cloud as a legitimate component of their IT environments. While multicloud usage is increasing, the complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a big challenge for healthcare organisations, with 92% of respondents saying that success requires simpler multicloud administration. A hybrid multicloud approach, an IT operating paradigm with various private and public clouds with interoperability between them, is suitable for addressing top concerns such as interoperability, security, cost, and data integration, according to 90% of respondents.
“Multicloud is here to stay, but complexity and challenges remain as regulations drive many of healthcare organisations’ 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 organisations to succeed.”
Healthcare survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they’re running business applications now, and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities may change because of it. Key findings from this year’s report include:
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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.
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Application mobility is top of mind. All healthcare organisations (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 data centre 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%).
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Cloud adoption is being fueled by a focus on business continuity and disaster recovery. Healthcare organisations have been slower to adopt the public cloud as a primary component of their IT environments for security reasons because it is a highly regulated business. On the other hand, healthcare IT experts have expressed an interest in using public cloud services as a backup IT infrastructure to which they can fail over for better business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) arrangements. In fact, the most common motivation for their three-year objectives to boost multicloud usage was to improve BC/DR (38%). Because this use case has a strong public cloud component, healthcare's interest in enhancing BC/DR could serve as a catalyst for broader public cloud adoption.
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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%).
Vanson Bourne performed research on behalf of Nutanix for the fourth year in a row in August and September 2021, surveying 1,700 IT decision-makers all across the world. This research is a companion to the global Fourth Annual Enterprise Cloud Index master report, and it focuses on cloud deployment and planning trends in the healthcare business, based on responses from 250 IT professionals in that area. It examines healthcare providers' cloud strategies, goals, and experiences and compares the healthcare industry's multicloud activity to that of other markets and the worldwide response base as a whole. The respondents were from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) regions.
