Healthcare’s Hesitation in Adopting Multi-Cloud

With people now accustomed to these new forms of healthcare services, it has increasingly become more important for the healthcare industry to keep up with new technological models such as the multi-cloud. The fourth annual Healthcare Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) has found that hybrid-multi-cloud is the ideal model of choice for 90% of healthcare IT respondents and over 50% of respondents expect to be using a multi-cloud environment within 1-3 years.

So, why are healthcare organisations struggling to adopt multi-cloud and ensure that their IT infrastructure is up to date?

1. Managing costs

As with all organisations, ensuring cost efficiency is of top priority, especially regarding IT infrastructure. Cost transparency, governance, and monitoring are hindering healthcare organisations from adopting multi-cloud. 80% of ECI respondents agreed that moving a workload to a new cloud environment can be costly, and 48% agreed that managing costs are a challenge.

2. Highly regulated industry

Being highly regulated in terms of privacy for patients and data, and mandates such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have found healthcare organisations more hesitant to trust and embrace public clouds.

3. Gap in IT skills

Healthcare organisations have fallen behind in transitioning to multi-cloud due to the lack of understanding surrounding the topic and how it differs from on-premises IT infrastructure. 84% of ECI respondents have confirmed that they are lacking the IT skills necessary to meet current business demand.

4. Security concerns

100% of ECI respondents have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment with 48% linking this move to security purposes. More and more IT departments are increasing their spending on strengthening security, especially post-pandemic with the rise in virtual healthcare services.

Although faced with obstacles, migrating to multi-cloud can offer healthcare organisations a multitude of benefits including:

• Opportunity to save with costs due to flexibility of choosing vendors based on price and affordability.
• Also, the flexibility in choosing vendors based on security and compliance requirements, geographic allocation, and performance to best suit their business objectives.
• Ability to utilise the best of each vendor’s capabilities and offerings compared to being limited to one vendor.
• Reliability of having one public cloud to fall back on in the instance of the other cloud having issues.
• Reducing vendor lock-in by spreading activities across multiple vendors.

The benefits of multi-cloud will make the possibly difficult journey of migrating worthwhile. With increased expectations of technological competencies in this digital age, the healthcare industry can stay up to date with a multi-cloud model. Evidently, despite being challenging, healthcare IT personnel identify that multi-cloud is the ideal model.

Sources:

MedCityNews – https://medcitynews.com/2022/06/whats-hindering-healthcare-organizations-from-adopting-multicloud/

HealthITSecurity – https://healthitsecurity.com/news/top-challenges-to-multi-cloud-adoption-in-healthcare

IBM –  https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/multicloud