Data security, compliance of utmost importance in Hybrid cloud adoption for healthcare organisations: Nutanix ECI report

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

Nutanix announced 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 ECI data found digital transformation significantly impacted cloud implementation across various industry verticals, and healthcare organisations were no different with 68 per cent citing this trend. In line with top healthcare IT trends, healthcare companies ranked personalised healthcare (52 per cent) and AI assistants (44 per cent) as positively impacting their cloud adoption. Embracing cloud is essential for healthcare organisations to deliver the most advanced care. 

No stranger to regulation, the healthcare industry knows compliance must remain top of mind. In fact, more than half of healthcare respondents (55 per cent) 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.  

Other findings from this year’s report include:

• Security and compliance rank as top factors driving cloud deployment decisions: 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 per cent). By comparison, cost placed a distant second, with just about 16 per cent of healthcare companies citing it as the top factor. What’s more, well over half of healthcare respondents (60.4 per cent) said that the state of intercloud security would be the factor having the biggest influence on their future cloud deployments.
• Hybrid cloud is considered the most secure, with public cloud coming last: While nearly all industries surveyed in the 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 per cent of the time, compared to the average of about 28 per cent from all ECI respondents. At a distant second, healthcare IT pros ranked on-premises, non-hosted private cloud as the second most secure infrastructure (21 per cent). They indicated that public cloud infrastructure was least secure, with only about 7 per cent choosing it as the most secure option.
• Expect aggressive adoption of hybrid cloud: An overwhelming majority of healthcare companies (87 per cent) 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 per cent while decreasing traditional data centre deployments by about 35 per cent. 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. 

“As real-time data becomes more crucial, especially with regard to patient information in times of a pandemic, data management and security remain of utmost importance for healthcare organisations. More organisations in healthcare are seeing the benefits of adopting digital solutions so they can remain efficient, agile, and deliver an improved patient experience. A hybrid cloud model enables IT teams to secure patient data and ensure regulatory compliance, while enabling healthcare providers to continue delivering advanced care to patients,” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, VP and MD-Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix.

The 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.

To learn more about the global report and findings, please download the ‘Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index‘ or register to access the healthcare industry findings.