Nutanix announced the findings of its sixth annual global Healthcare Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption in the industry. The research showed that hybrid multicloud adoption is surging among healthcare organizations as the majority are significantly increasing investments in IT modernization.

This year's Healthcare ECI report revealed that the use of hybrid multicloud models in healthcare is forecasted to double over the next one to three years. IT decision-makers at healthcare organizations are facing new pressures to modernize IT infrastructures to effectively harness the power of AI, mitigate security risks, and be more sustainable.

Healthcare organizations handle large amounts of personal health information (PHI) that can be complex to manage with the need to remain compliant with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). As organizations in all industries continue to grapple with the complexities of moving applications and data across environments, hybrid multicloud solutions provide key benefits to healthcare organizations including helping them simplify operations, deliver better patient outcomes, and improve clinician productivity. The Healthcare ECI report found the adoption of the hybrid multicloud operating model in healthcare organizations has increased by 10 percentage points compared to last year, jumping from 6% to 16%. While deployment trailed other industries last year, healthcare is now on par with all industries (15%).

"Healthcare organizations have traditionally lagged behind in technology adoption, yet we've seen an impressive increase in modernization in the last year alone - driven by AI and the need for data portability," said Scott Ragsdale, Sr. Director, Sales, U.S. Healthcare at Nutanix. "Across industries, 80% of Healthcare ECI respondents are planning to invest in IT modernization, with 85% planning to increase their investments specifically to support AI. Healthcare organizations are no different, focusing on future-proofing IT infrastructure today to prepare for the needs of tomorrow - including AI and sustainability."

Healthcare survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they're running business applications today, and where they plan to run them in the future. Key findings from this year's report include:

• Healthcare organizations have accelerated their use of multiple IT operating models, and both their current and planned mixed IT deployments now surpass those of the global response pool. Nearly three-fourths (73%) of ECI respondents in healthcare organizations reported using multiple IT models this year, compared to 53% last year. Last year, healthcare was behind the average across industries by seven percentage points and now outpaces it by 13 points.
• When healthcare organizations are investing in IT infrastructure, workload portability and AI support are top of mind-and next year's budgets reflect these priorities. ECI respondents in the healthcare sector identified AI and the flexibility to move workloads back and forth across private and public cloud infrastructure as the most important factor driving purchasing decisions at 17% each followed in importance by the performance potential of the infrastructure (14%) and how well it lends itself to successful data sovereignty and privacy management (14%).
• Security and compliance fluctuations and concerns are the biggest reasons enterprises relocate their applications to a different infrastructure. An overwhelming majority of healthcare respondents (98%) and across industries (95%) responded that they moved one or more applications in the past 12 months driving the need in their organizations for simple and flexible inter-cloud workload and application portability. This is largely being fueled largely by shifting security-related requirements according to respondents.
• AI has broad applicability in the healthcare sector, and respondents consider it both a priority and a challenge. ECI respondents shared that support for AI tied as the top IT infrastructure purchase criterion among healthcare organizations. In addition, implementing AI strategies came in second when healthcare respondents ranked what they considered the biggest priority for their organizations' CIOs, CTOs, and leadership (17%). 84% of healthcare organizations said they were increasing investments in AI strategy in the coming year. The same group, however, largely considered running AI to be a challenge (82%).
• The top-ranked challenges in healthcare IT departments are related to multi-environment operations, security, and sustainability. When asked to name their number one data management challenge today, an equal percentage of healthcare ECI respondents identified complying with data storage/usage guidelines and linking data across disparate environments (20%) as the top factor. Other data security issues, including combating ransomware and ensuring data privacy, were each cited by the next greatest number of respondents (17%).

For the sixth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world in December 2023. The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies, including North and South America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region.

To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full Healthcare Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, here.