Frost & Sullivan’s recent global annual cloud survey’s primary goal is to determine cloud computing technology adoption among healthcare organizations, top business strategic goals, preferred cloud deployment models, information technology (IT), business challenges in cloud migration, and expansion opportunities for healthcare cloud providers.

For more than a decade, the cloud has been a critical force powering digital transformation efforts for enterprises around the world. Hyperscalers, such as AWS and Microsoft, provide infrastructure and platform-as-a-service offerings to clients across various industries and have been dominating the market. In the past three years, a new chapter in cloud computing began, marked by verticalization and the rise of industry clouds, among which the healthcare vertical is the most prominent and fastest-growing one.

Increasingly, public cloud providers have begun using the traditional cloud capabilities from their tech stacks as a base and then tailoring their horizontal solutions to address specific industry use cases. They then extend the offerings by co-inventing new solutions with third parties to add more vertical-specific functionality to the baseline offerings. Micro-vertical intellectual property empowers enterprise customers with the capabilities needed to solve the discrete problems in their verticals and address new opportunities for innovation and growth.

The healthcare industry witnessed an unprecedented uptick in demand during the pandemic, necessitating rapid digital transformation. Industry challenges include the high cost of providing services to patients, cybersecurity threats, expanding telehealth infrastructure, and the need to reach a wider population in novel ways. Not surprisingly, the greatest challenges with cloud implementation for healthcare companies are managing costs, ensuring compliance while adjusting tech strategy in response to market environments, and keeping up with the rapid pace of technology change.

Author: Rishi Pathak