Enterprise
Cloud Index

In August and September 2021, researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,700 IT decision-makers worldwide about where they're running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their cloud challenges are, and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT priorities.

This report is supplemental to the global Fourth Annual Enterprise Cloud Index master report and focuses on cloud deployment and planning trends in the healthcare industry based on the responses of 250 IT professionals in that market. It highlights healthcare provider cloud plans, priorities, and experiences and includes comparisons of the healthcare industry's multicloud activity with that of other markets and the global response base overall.

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. Enterprises in the healthcare industry are part of the multicloud trend, but their deployments to date moderately trail the averages.

The reasons for adoption variability range from differences in each industry's regulatory landscape to the level of cloud-native skill sets on staff. The healthcare industry is highly regulated in terms of patient and data privacy, which drives many of its deployment decisions. ECI respondents are at various stages of their multicloud journey as they decommission older, legacy infrastructure at different paces, guided by factors such as cost and requirements to retain critical legacy applications. Healthcare organizations appear to be in the early phases of adoption. However, regardless of where they are in their multicloud journeys, the majority of all respondents, including those in the healthcare industry, agree that multicloud is the ideal IT environment for their organizations.

1While 90% of ECI healthcare respondents agreed that hybrid multicloud is the ideal IT model for their organizations, they’ve been slower to adopt it than other industries. Only the financial services industry trails healthcare in currently reported deployments.

2All healthcare respondents (100%) said they had moved applications to a different infrastructure last year, and security was the biggest reason.

3Healthcare IT pros consider achieving consistency and integration across dissimilar clouds to be significant multicloud challenges.

4Staff skill set shortages, management complexity, and application mobility difficulties are slowing multicloud adoption among healthcare organizations.

5Public cloud-based improvements in disaster recovery/business continuity are the biggest drivers behind healthcare respondent plans to nearly double their multicloud use in three years.

Multicloud is increasingly a by-product of cloud-smart IT strategies that call for workload optimization, which entails making changes to where applications run as cost, resource demands, and business goals shift. All healthcare respondents (100%) said they had moved one or more clinical or business applications to a different IT environment over the prior 12 months. Given healthcare's above-average private cloud and traditional datacenter penetration, it's likely that much of this activity entailed moving applications out of legacy three-tier environments and into private clouds.

Not surprisingly, privacy-conscious healthcare respondents cited security and compliance reasons most often (48%) as the reason for moving apps to a different infrastructure. Healthcare notably outpaced the global average (41%) on this score (Figure 3). The reason mentioned second most often by healthcare respondents for moving an application was a desire to gain better control of that application (39%).

While adoption of multiple clouds, whether private or public, appears to be trending upwards, enterprises also face challenges with this IT model. These are early days for multicloud adoption, so it's understandable that ECI respondents cited some sticking points in their IT journeys to get there. Most respondents mentioned securing their data across multiple clouds as a major concern. Healthcare respondents also mentioned this issue but found integrating data across cloud borders and managing cost and performance in the unified environment to be even more pressing issues (Figure 4).

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to influence IT decisions and strategies, driving IT teams to focus on areas that more broadly empower the business. When asked what their organizations have done differently because of the pandemic, healthcare respondents’ top answers were that they intensified their focus on creating digital customer experiences (57%), offered more flexible work options to employees (54%), strengthened business continuity (52%), and sought new ways to increase their competitiveness (47%).

Healthcare respondents also said that the pandemic has spurred them to increase their IT spending in certain areas that emphasize bolstering their security posture (62%), implementing AI-based self-service technology (60%), and upgrading existing IT infrastructure (48%).

Going forward, healthcare respondents ranked the adoption of 5G (47%), AI/ML-based services (46%), and improving DR/BC (45%) as their top IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months.

IT security is a moving-target issue likely to remain front and center indefinitely in the healthcare industry and other industries, as nearly all face some form of customer data privacy regulation. However, the availability of hybrid multicloud solutions that enable businesses to centrally build and enforce top-down, cross-cloud security and compliance policies will eventually level the playing field to enable equally effective defenses independent of infrastructure.

To fully execute on the multicloud vision, healthcare and other enterprises are challenged to achieve the following:

Simplified and integrated manageability and security. IT teams must have unified visibility and the ability to set and enforce security policies consistently across clouds. In the absence of on-staff skillsets that run deep in multiple different public cloud platforms, organizations will look to technology solutions that abstract the underlying differences among cloud platforms with integrated tools that deliver visibility, manageability, consistent policy-setting and enforcement, and cost control across environments.

The ability to move apps among infrastructures cost-effectively. With the majority of both healthcare and global ECI respondents (80%) saying that moving apps can be time-consuming and costly, it's expected that the adoption of hybrid multicloud and containerized application adoption will rise in step with multicloud deployments to enable clinical and business apps to run and move nearly anywhere. By the time healthcare respondent organizations are ready for these tools on a large scale, they'll likely have many more options available to them than are on the market today.