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 a report by Nutanix, an enterprise cloud computing firm, in just two years, healthcare providers’ hybrid cloud deployment will jump from 19% penetration to 37%.
Investing in next generation IT infrastructure is the first step in preserving the current quality of care and bringing healthcare to the individual rather than the other way around, says Neville Vincent, vice-president ANZ, ASEAN and India, Nutanix. 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. Organisations 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. When it comes to public cloud spend, the survey demonstrated that healthcare companies report being about 40% over budget , 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 Internet of Things (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 organisations. These skills ranked second in scarcity only to those in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.