Healthcare industry in early stages of multicloud adoption

Healthcare organisations are behind the cross-industry global respondent average, according to new research.

However, adoption is expected to jump from 27 percent to 51 percent in the next three years, evolving to a multicloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds.

The figures come from Nutanix‘s latest Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey. Multicloud is an increasingly popular IT architecture, but among healthcare respondents, 30 percent 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 bonafide component of their IT environments for security and privacy reasons, said the report.

While multicloud adoption is trending upwards, the complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for healthcare organisations, with 92 percent of respondents agreeing that success requires simpler management across multicloud infrastructures. To address top challenges related to interoperability, security, cost and data integration, 90 percent 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,” 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.”

Current cloud challenges

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. They 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.

Top multicloud challenges includeintegrating data across clouds (49 percent), managing costs (48 percent), and performance challenges with network overlays (45 percent). 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 percent 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.

Application mobility is top of mind. All healthcare organisations (100 percent) 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 datacentre penetration.

Yet, 80 percent of respondents agree that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly and time-consuming. They cite security (48 percent) most often as the reason for the move, outpacing the global average (41 percent), followed by gaining control of the application (38 percent), and improving performance (36 percent).

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 percent). 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, noted the study.

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