Security, compliance beat cost in healthcare cloud concerns

Nutanix has found that healthcare companies ranked personalised healthcare (52%) and AI assistants (44%) as positively impacting their cloud adoption.

This was announced in the healthcare industry findings of its second annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring healthcare organisations' plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds.

Healthcare organisations around the globe are under pressure to drive digital transformation to meet increasing patient care demands.

Overall 2019 ECI data found digital transformation significantly impacted cloud implementation across various industry verticals, and healthcare organisations were no different with 68% citing this trend.

More than half of healthcare respondents (55%) cited regulations governing data storage as a top factor influencing future cloud model adoption at their organisations.

The report also found that healthcare organisations were marginally less concerned with cost and budget than they were with accelerating IT deployment. 

When asked about the top factor influencing how they decide where to host a given workload, data security and compliance came up most often in healthcare companies (29%).

By comparison, cost placed a distant second, with just about 16% of healthcare companies citing it as the top factor.

Well over half of healthcare respondents (60.4%) said that the state of intercloud security would be the factor having the biggest influence on their future cloud deployments.

While nearly all industries surveyed in the 2019 ECI said they consider hybrid cloud to be the most secure IT operating model, the percentage was even higher among healthcare respondents.

Healthcare organisations chose hybrid cloud as most secure almost 33% of the time, compared to the average of about 28% from all 2019 ECI respondents.

At a distant second, healthcare IT pros ranked on-premises, non-hosted private cloud as the second most secure infrastructure (21%). They indicated that public cloud infrastructure was least secure, with only about 7% choosing it as the most secure option.

An overwhelming majority of healthcare companies (87%) identified hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model.

In the next three to five years, healthcare companies shared aggressive plans to increase hybrid usage by a net 44% while decreasing traditional data center deployments by about 35%.

While other industries currently outpace the healthcare space with higher adoption of hybrid cloud, ECI data finds healthcare companies have confidence that the issues of tools, cloud skills, and other obstacles impeding adoption will be worked out fairly quickly.

The 2019 respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.