From telehealth and virtual care to “stay at home” programs, the healthcare industry has implemented major changes to accommodate changing patient and workforce needs over the past two years. As the industry adapts and expands on these approaches, it is more important than ever for healthcare organizations to benefit from the flexibility and operational efficiencies offered by a multi-cloud model. After all, according to our research, multi-cloud has become the most commonly deployed IT model worldwide, used by businesses of all sizes and industries. However, the reality is that the healthcare industry in particular is struggling to keep its IT infrastructure up to date.
Results from our fourth annual Healthcare Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) show that 90% of healthcare IT respondents believe hybrid multicloud is an IT operating model that includes multiple private and public clouds and is interoperable , is their ideal mode of choice. Still, with a current adoption rate of 27%, private cloud is the most common IT model for healthcare organizations. This leads to a pressing question: what’s stopping them? If multi-cloud is on the rise in other industries and is favored by healthcare IT professionals, what’s holding them back from deploying it? The answer is not simple, but healthcare organizations face some major challenges:
strict regulations
The first hurdle to multi-cloud deployment is the nature of the healthcare industry, which is highly regulated when it comes to patient and data privacy. Compliance with regulatory requirements such as HIPAA drives many deployment decisions, which may be why healthcare IT professionals have been slower to trust the public cloud as a true part of their IT environment. However, extending an on-premises private cloud to one or more public clouds for appropriate use cases, including storing patient healthcare information, is a fundamental step towards creating a multi-cloud environment and gaining flexibility to meet emerging and evolving needs .
safe question
Closely related to stringent privacy regulations are the security concerns facing healthcare IT professionals. During the pandemic, healthcare’s focus on security has escalated, causing its IT department to spend more money on strengthening security. In the past 12 months, 100% of ECI respondents have migrated one or more applications to a new IT environment, with 48% seeing the move as a security measure. While security concerns undoubtedly remain paramount in the healthcare industry, the availability of hybrid multi-cloud solutions that enable organizations to centrally build and execute top-down cross-cloud security and compliance policies will ultimately level the playing field to achieve Equally effective defense, independent of infrastructure.
IT skills gap
This is Currently facing a skills gap A crisis across industries, healthcare is no exception, as 84% of ECI respondents said they lack the IT skills to meet current business needs. In addition to requiring employee IT skills to move regulated data from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, IT must also have a solid understanding of cloud security configuration and enforcement practices versus traditional on-premises IT security practices (and between different public cloud providers) ). Lacking the complex skills and understanding required to transition to multi-cloud, many healthcare organizations have been slow to take the steps required to achieve multi-cloud.
cost management
Cost efficiency plays an important role in the upgrades that IT departments choose – for them, cost savings is synonymous with optimizing resources. So it’s no surprise that cost management is a top consideration when exploring multi-cloud deployments: 80% of ECI respondents agree that migrating workloads to a new cloud environment can be costly, while 48% agree Respondents also cited managing costs as a challenge. To modernize operations and increase efficiency, healthcare IT can take several paths as it embraces cloud technologies and cloud-centric operating models. With a virtualized architecture providing a platform for storage, computing, security, infrastructure management and monitoring, organizations can achieve significant cost savings. In addition to choosing a cloud platform with these capabilities, another key is implementing an intelligent strategy for cost governance and monitoring. A clear understanding of the ongoing cost of each cloud is critical to avoid unnecessary spending.
Although traditionally behind the scenes, the IT departments of healthcare organizations are now at the forefront of business success, as they have become a key driver of day-to-day and big-picture operations since the onset of the pandemic. With the needs and preferences of future patients — and the innovations developed to meet them — uncertain, healthcare IT professionals must adopt a hybrid multi-cloud IT infrastructure that spans a mix of private and public clouds and interoperability between them. While multi-cloud penetration is expected to double over the next three years, healthcare IT professionals seem to agree. While there may be a challenging road ahead, the rewards of cloudiness will be worth it.
