Nutanix has unveiled the results of its Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) research in the healthcare industry. The study indicates substantial progress in cloud adoption within the healthcare sector, although it currently trails behind other industries in this regard. Nevertheless, the sector is anticipating exponential growth, with expectations of adoption rising from 53 percent to 74 percent over the next three years. This aligns with the global trend favoring multicloud IT infrastructures, combining private and public cloud solutions.
Of particular significance is the healthcare sector’s enthusiasm for the hybrid multicloud model, which represents the highest anticipated growth model among all industries surveyed in the ECI. Currently, 6 percent of healthcare sector respondents have adopted this model, compared to the cross-industry average of 12 percent. However, healthcare entities plan to significantly accelerate hybrid multicloud deployments, expecting an impressive surge of 38 percentage points over the next three years, ultimately achieving a 44 percent penetration rate. Furthermore, a portion of healthcare companies intends to transition to multiple public clouds (multiclouds) as a unified IT infrastructure, foreseeing an increase from the current 0 percent to 8 percent by 2026.
Survey participants were asked about the challenges they encounter in the cloud, how they manage business applications, and their future deployment plans. Key findings from the study include:
1. Cybersecurity Drives IT Infrastructure Investments: Cybersecurity stands out as the primary driver behind IT infrastructure investment decisions, as cited by 13 percent of respondents. This is followed closely by concerns about data sovereignty (12 percent) and the flexibility of cloud and on-premise execution (9 percent). Interestingly, only 4 percent of respondents mentioned cost considerations, despite the majority ranking cost control as a top challenge. In fact, 86 percent of healthcare respondents identified cloud cost control as a challenge, with 36 percent regarding it as “significant.”
2. Mixed Environments Demand Unified Management: A striking 96 percent of healthcare organizations concur that they should ideally possess a single platform to oversee their diverse public and private infrastructures. Consequently, disaster recovery (42 percent) emerges as the primary challenge in managing mixed infrastructures, closely followed by concerns related to data visibility (41 percent), data analysis and orchestration (40 percent), and data storage costs (40 percent).
3. Application Mobility Prevails: All healthcare organizations have migrated one or more applications to new IT environments in the past year. The leading reasons for such migrations are security and sustainability, each cited by 40 percent of respondents.
According to Mohammed Abulhouf, Senior Director & GM EMEA Emerging Markets at Nutanix, “The report unmistakably signals that hybrid multicloud will become the preferred IT infrastructure model for healthcare providers in the future. Any discussion about the evolution of hybrid infrastructure within an organization should encompass emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, and edge computing. These technologies will introduce fresh challenges but also accelerate the attainment of business and revenue objectives.”
For the fifth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted the study on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers globally between December 2022 and January 2023. The research focuses on cloud deployment and planning trends within the healthcare industry, drawing insights from 250 IT professionals in the sector. It provides valuable insights into the strategies, priorities, and experimentation of healthcare cloud providers, offering comparisons of multicloud activity in the healthcare sector with other industries and regions. The respondent pool spans diverse industries, company sizes, and geographical regions, including the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region.
