Top Challenges to Multi-Cloud Adoption in Healthcare

Multi-cloud adoption is steadily growing in healthcare, but challenges remain as organizations grapple with tough IT deployment decisions, Nutanix found in its Enterprise Cloud Index survey and report, conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne.

Vanson Bourne surveyed 250 IT professionals working in the healthcare industry to garner insights about cloud priorities, plans, and experiences. A vast majority of respondents agreed that a hybrid multi-cloud architecture was ideal for their organizations. Over 50 percent of respondents said that they expect to be using a multi-cloud environment within one to three years.

Multi-cloud implies that a business is using multiple different public clouds rather than mixing private and public clouds together. While the pros and cons of each cloud architecture are worth considering, multi-cloud environments can be more cost-effective than other options while allowing for additional scalability and security in healthcare.

“Fourth Annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) research indicates that while the adoption of multiple clouds, private or public, is rigorously underway across the globe, deployment progress varies among industries and geographies,” the report stated.

“Enterprises in the healthcare industry are part of the [multi-cloud] trend, but their deployments to date moderately trail the averages.”

Behind healthcare, only the financial services industry has been slower to adopt multi-cloud. The healthcare industry and the finance industry are both highly regulated sectors with data security requirements that contribute greatly to their IT deployment decisions. The healthcare sector is also riddled with critical but outdated legacy systems.  

Private cloud architectures currently lead the healthcare market, the report found.

“Extending on-premises private clouds to one or more public clouds for appropriate use cases is a fundamental step toward creating a [multi-cloud] environment and gaining the flexibility to meet diverse needs as they arise and evolve,” the report suggested.

Application mobility, integrating data across clouds, and managing costs were among the top-reported multi-cloud challenges in the healthcare sector. In addition, privacy and compliance concerns were the top reasons for not moving apps to a different infrastructure.

Despite these challenges, the benefits of cloud adoption cannot be ignored. Healthcare IT professionals reported the cloud’s ability to support remote employees, drive business continuity, and support compute-intensive workloads as driving forces in cloud adoption.

In the next 12 to 18 months, survey respondents said that their IT teams would prioritize adopting 5G and artificial intelligence services, as well as multi-cloud management.

“Healthcare organizations are moving from cloud-first to cloud-smart strategies. Infrastructure changes are being driven by enterprise realizations, after about a decade of public cloud service availability, that optimizing IT infrastructure involves matching clinical and business workloads to the environment best suited for them, even as conditions and demands change,” the report continued.

“In other words, enterprises are shifting from cloud-first strategies, whereby they indiscriminately plan to move as many IT resources as fast as possible to the public cloud to modified cloud-smart strategies. With this approach, private or public cloud is preferred, but which cloud for which workload or application is dependent on several factors and can change over time.”

As cloud adoption continues to increase across the healthcare sector, one thing is certain: security and privacy are paramount.