Nutanix announced the findings of its seventh 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 99% of healthcare organizations surveyed are currently leveraging GenAI applications or workloads today, more than any other industry. This includes a mix of applications from AI-powered chatbots to code co-pilots and clinical development automation. However, the overwhelming majority (96%) share that their current data security and governance measures are insufficient to fully support GenAI at scale.

"In healthcare, every decision we make has a direct impact on patient outcomes - including how we evolve our technology stack," said Jon Edwards, Director IS Infrastructure Engineering at Legacy Health. "We took a close look at how to integrate GenAI responsibly, and that meant investing in infrastructure that supports long-term innovation without compromising on data privacy or security. We're committed to modernizing our systems to deliver better care, drive efficiency, and uphold the trust that patients place in us."

This year's report revealed that healthcare leaders are adopting GenAI at record rates while concerns remain. The number one issue flagged by healthcare leaders is the ability to integrate it with existing IT infrastructure (79%) followed closely by the fact that healthcare data silos still exist (65%), and development challenges with cloud native applications and containers (59%) are persistent.

"While healthcare has typically been slower to adopt new technologies, we've seen a significant uptick in the adoption of GenAI, much of this likely due to the ease of access to GenAI applications and tools," said Scott Ragsdale, Senior Director, Sales - Healthcare & SLED at Nutanix. "Even with such large adoption rates by organizations, there continue to be concerns given the importance of protecting healthcare data. Although all organizations surveyed are using GenAI in some capacity, we'll likely see more widespread adoption within those organizations as concerns around privacy and security are resolved."

Healthcare survey respondents were asked about GenAI adoptions and trends, Kubernetes and containers, how they're running business and mission critical applications today, and where they plan to run them in the future. Key findings from this year's report include:

• GenAI solution adoption and deployment across healthcare will necessitate a more comprehensive approach to data security. Healthcare respondents indicate a significant amount of work needs to be done to improve the foundational levels of data security/governance required to support GenAI solution implementation and success. The No. 1 challenge faced by healthcare organizations when it comes to leveraging or expanding utilization of GenAI is privacy and security concerns of using large language models (LLMs) with sensitive company data. Furthermore, 96% of healthcare respondents agree that their organization could be doing more to secure their GenAI models and applications. Improving data security and governance at the scale needed to support emerging GenAI workloads will be a long-term challenge and priority for many healthcare organizations.
• Prioritize infrastructure modernization to support GenAI at scale across healthcare organizations. Running modern applications at enterprise scale requires infrastructure solutions that can support the necessary requirements for complex data security, data integrity and resilience. Unfortunately, 99% of healthcare respondents admit they face challenges when scaling GenAI workloads from development to production - with the No. 1 issue being integration with existing IT infrastructure. For this reason, we believe it is imperative that healthcare IT decision-makers prioritize infrastructure investments and modernization as a key enabling component of GenAI initiatives.
• GenAI solution adoption in the healthcare sector continues at a rapid pace, but there are still challenges to overcome. When it comes to GenAI adoption, healthcare metrics are excellent, with 99% of industry respondents saying their organization is leveraging GenAI applications/workloads today. Most healthcare organizations believe GenAI solutions will help improve levels of productivity, automation, and efficiency.
• Meanwhile, real-world GenAI use cases across healthcare segments gravitate towards GenAI-based customer support and experience solutions (e.g., chatbots), and code generation and code co-pilots. However, healthcare organizations also note a range of challenges and potential hindrances regarding GenAI solution development and deployment, including patient data security and privacy, scalability, and complexity.
• Application containerization and Kubernetes® deployments are expanding across the healthcare industry. Container-based infrastructure and application development has the potential to allow organizations to deliver seamless, secure access to patient and business data across hybrid and multicloud environments. Application containerization is pervasive across industry sectors and is set to expand in adoption across healthcare as well, with 99% of industry respondents saying their organization is at least in the process of containerizing applications.This trend may be driven by the fact that 92% of healthcare respondents agree their organization benefits from adopting cloud native applications/containers. These findings suggest that the majority of IT decision-makers in healthcare will be considering how containerization fits into expansion strategies for new and existing workloads.

For the seventh consecutive year, Nutanix commissioned a global research study to learn about the state of global enterprise cloud deployments, application containerization trends, and GenAI application adoption. In the Fall of 2024, U.K. researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world. 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