Healthcare respondents in an international multi-industry survey have pointed to AI, cybersecurity and sustainability as top drivers of IT infrastructure upgrades/investments

In a Dec 2023 survey of 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world* to gauge respondents’ cloud adoption progress, key trends from the data were identified for the global healthcare industry.

First, IT decision-makers at healthcare organizations cited facing “new pressures to modernize IT infrastructures to effectively harness the power of AI, mitigate security risks, and be more sustainable.” This could be linked to the need to comply with evolving data security and healthcare regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they were running business applications at the time of the survey, and where they planned to run them in the future.

Key findings

Nearly three-fourths (73%) of respondents in healthcare organizations reported using multiple IT models in 2023, compared to 53% in a similar survey in 2022, where this trend in the healthcare respondents was behind the average across industries by 7%.

For the 2023 survey, healthcare respondents were showing 13% higher-than-average use of multiple IT models. Health respondents’ adoption of hybrid multi-cloud operating models had increased by 10% compared to those in a 2022 survey — a jump from 6% to 16% — and now on equal footing with the same trend in all other industries surveyed. Also:

    • 17% of respondents in the healthcare sector cited AI, and 17% cited the “flexibility to move workloads back and forth across private and public cloud infrastructure” as the most important factor driving purchasing decisions. Other top factors were “the performance potential of the infrastructure” (14%) and “how well it lends itself to successful data sovereignty and privacy management” (14%).
    • 98% of healthcare respondents (98%) and 95% of respondents across the industries surveyed cited having moved one or more applications in the past 12 months to facilitate the need for “simple and flexible inter-cloud workload and application portability” and also shifting security-related requirements./li>
    • 17% of healthcare respondents ranked implementing AI strategies as the second biggest priority for their organizations’ CIOs, CTOs, and leadership — after “accelerating application development (19%). Also, 84% of healthcare respondents cited plans to increase investments in AI strategy in year after the survey, with 82% having the concurrent sentiment that running AI to was a challenge.
    • 20% of healthcare respondents cited “complying with data storage/usage guidelines and linking data across disparate environments as the top data management challenge. This tied with 20% of healthcare respondents citing “linking data across disparate environments”. Other data security issues, including combating ransomware and ensuring data privacy, were each cited by the next greatest number of respondents (17%).
    • 80% of respondents across industries surveyed cited planning to invest in IT modernization, with 85% planning to increase their investments specifically to support AI. Healthcare respondents were no different, citing plans to focus on future-proofing IT infrastructure to prepare for the needs of tomorrow, including AI and sustainability.”

According to Scott Ragsdale, Senior Director, Sales (U.S. Healthcare), Nutanix, which commissioned the survey, healthcare respondents had traditionally lagged behind in technology adoption, “yet we’ve seen an impressive increase in modernization in the last year alone — driven by AI and the need for data portability.”

* The respondents came from multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies, including North and South America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific-Japan region (APJ).