Nutanix,
Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced the
healthcare industry findings of its Enterprise Cloud Index Report,
measuring healthcare companies' plans for adopting private, hybrid and
public clouds. The report revealed the healthcare industry is
increasingly leaning toward adopting hybrid clouds that combine private
and public cloud services, and their respective benefits - with
healthcare ranking third in the number of hybrid cloud deployments
currently running, by industry. According to respondents, in just two
years, healthcare providers' hybrid cloud deployment will jump from 19%
penetration to 37%.
Today,
healthcare organizations need to address a variety of critical IT
needs, including a need for increased security, protection of sensitive
patient data and meeting regulatory compliance. Over 28% of healthcare
respondents named security and compliance as their number one decision
criterion in choosing where to run workloads. With hackers targeting
medical records containing sought-after personal details like patient
healthcare and insurance information, hospitals and providers require
technology solutions that can handle the movement of sensitive data
without risk. And, as healthcare providers also have to meet necessary security and HIPAA compliance for patient data, they seek out a solution that fits those specific needs.
To
address ongoing security and compliance concerns, results showed the
healthcare industry turning to hybrid cloud for optimum flexibility and
the ability to move applications between private and public clouds. More
than half of survey respondents from the healthcare industry noted
inter-cloud application mobility as "essential," further demonstrating
this need for seamless movement of applications and associated data,
networking services, and security policies between different types of
clouds.
From
a patient and clinician perspective, adopting a cloud model, hybrid or
otherwise, also allows for providers to undergo a digital transformation
of healthcare delivery. Infrastructure innovations allow hospitals to
manage different applications and data types, take advantage of
automation and create new service lines such as telehealth or remote
monitoring, thus leading to improved patient engagement.
Other key findings of the report include:
- Healthcare companies overspend on public cloud:
Another motivation for deploying hybrid clouds is likely enterprises'
need to gain control over their IT spend. Organizations that use public
cloud spend 26% of their annual IT budget on public cloud, with this
percentage set to increase to 35% in two years' time. The survey
demonstrated healthcare companies report being about 40% over budget
when it comes to public cloud spend, compared to 35% of cross-industry
global companies.
- Healthcare public cloud usage outpaces other industries for IoT:
The healthcare industry is embracing public clouds at about the same
pace as most sectors, reporting a 13% penetration compared to the 12%
global average. However, healthcare companies outpace the averages for
certain applications, such as ERP/CRM, data analytics, containers, and
IoT.
- Hybrid IT skills are scarce in healthcare:
While 88% of respondents said that they expect hybrid cloud to
positively impact their businesses, hybrid cloud skills are scarce in
today's IT organizations. These skills ranked second in scarcity only to
those in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
"Healthcare
organizations especially need the flexibility, ease of management and
security that the cloud delivers, and this need will only become more
prominent as attacks on systems become more advanced, compliance
regulations more stringent, and data storage needs more demanding," said
Chris Kozup, SVP of Global Marketing at Nutanix. "As our findings
predict, healthcare organizations are bullish on hybrid cloud growth for
their core applications and will continue to see it as the ideal
solution as we usher in the next era of healthcare. With the cloud
giving way to new technologies and tools such as machine learning and
automation, we expect to see positive changes leading to better
healthcare solutions in the long run."
"As
a healthcare organization, we're responsible for managing critical
clinical and IT applications such as EHR and PACS as well as making sure
we have an infrastructure that is secure and scalable to support
changing needs such as hybrid cloud-based disaster recovery. We knew
that the right hyper-converged infrastructure would allow us to manage
these workloads on a single, cost-effective solution," said Dave Lehr,
CIO of Anne Arundel Medical Center. "Deploying the Nutanix Enterprise
Cloud has helped us realize this hybrid vision. We've improved the
performance and availability of our core healthcare systems, while
enabling our staff to work more efficiently. We've opened the door for
our staff to work on higher-level improvements, which has led to an
entirely enhanced patient experience."
To
create this report, Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey more
than 2,300 IT decision makers, including 345 worldwide healthcare
organizations, about where they are 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
projects and priorities. The survey included respondents from multiple
industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the
Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.
To learn more about the global report and findings, please download the "Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index 2018," here.