Data security and compliance
deemed leading factors in
hybrid cloud adoption
utanix, a leader in enterprise
N
cloud computing, has
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, 2019 ECI data
found Digital Transformation significantly
impacted cloud implementation across
various industry verticals and healthcare
organisations were no different with
68% citing this trend. In line with
top healthcare IT trends, healthcare
companies ranked personalised
healthcare (52%) and AI assistants
(44%) 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%) 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%). By
comparison, cost placed a distant
second, with just about 16% of
healthcare companies citing it as the
top factor. What’s more, well over half
of healthcare respondents (60.4%)
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 2019 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% of the time, compared to the
average of about 28% from all 2019
ECI respondents. At a distant second,
healthcare IT pros ranked onpremises,
non-hosted private cloud as
the second most secure infrastructure
(21%). They indicated that public
cloud infrastructure was least secure,
with only about 7% choosing it as the
most secure option.
• Expect aggressive adoption of
hybrid cloud: An overwhelming
majority of healthcare companies
(87%) 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% while decreasing traditional
data centre deployments by about
35%. 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.
“Healthcare organisations today are
looking to improve patient experience,
increase data interoperability and deliver
both virtual and value-based care,”
said Cheryl Rodenfels, Healthcare
Strategist at Nutanix. “These outcomes
cannot be achieved without harnessing
the power of flexible and secure cloud
infrastructure. A hybrid cloud model
enables IT teams to secure patient data
and ensure regulatory compliance while
allowing healthcare providers to continue
delivering advanced technological care
to extend patient experience to the
digital space.” u
intelligent DATA SECURITY
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