Healthcare organisations appear to be in the early phases of cloud adoption and behind the cross-industry global respondent average.

However, adoption is expected to jump from 27 per cent to 51 per cent 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.

These are among the findings from Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud Index (EDI) study and research report that measured enterprise progress with cloud adoption in the healthcare industry.

Multicloud is the dominant IT architecture in use worldwide: however, among healthcare ECI respondents, 30 per cent say private cloud is their most common IT deployment model.

The healthcare industry is highly regulated and has likely been slower to embrace the public cloud as a bona fide component of their IT environments for security and privacy reasons.

While multicloud adoption is trending upwards, the complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for healthcare organisations, with 92 per cent of respondents agreeing that success requires simpler management across multicloud infrastructures.

To address top challenges related to interoperability, security, cost, and data integration, 90 per cent 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 organisations’ IT deployment decisions,” says Joseph Wolfgram, healthcare chief technology officer 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:

• Top multicloud challenges include integrating data across clouds (49 per cent), managing costs (48 per cent), and performance challenges with network overlays (45 per cent). 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 per cent 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.

• Application mobility is top of mind. All healthcare organisations (100 per cent) 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 per cent of respondents agree that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming. They cite security (48 per cent) most often as the reason for the move, outpacing the global average (41 per cent), followed by gaining control of the application (38 per cent), and improving performance (36 per cent).

• Focus on business continuity and disaster recovery is helping to drive cloud adoption. Due to being a highly regulated industry, healthcare organisations 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). In fact, they cited improving BC/DR most often as motivating their three-year plans to increase multicloud use (38 per cent). Healthcare’s interest in boosting BC/DR could prove to be the impetus for greater public cloud acceptance, as this use case has a strong public cloud component, which could accelerate the industry’s general multicloud usage.

• Top healthcare IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months include adopting 5G (47 per cent) and AI/ML-based services (46 per cent), and improving BC/DR (45 per cent), and multicloud management (44 per cent). 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 per cent), implementing AI-based self-service technology (60 per cent), and upgrading existing IT infrastructure (48 per cent).

For the fourth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world in August and September 2021.