Healthcare providers are accelerating digitization strategies due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The most successful providers leverage cloud computing to meet business agility, cost savings, innovation, data storage, security, and privacy goals.

Frost & Sullivan conducted the 2020 Global Cloud User Survey between August and September 2020 in North America—the United States, Canada; Latin America (LATAM)—Brazil, Mexico; Europe and the Middle East (EME); and Asia-Pacific (APAC). We derived insights on cloud adoption, deployment, and usage based on the healthcare/social work sample, which comprises 8.5% of the total survey sample size.

Among the industries Frost & Sullivan polled, healthcare had the highest percentage still running IT resources on traditional data centers that had not been cloud-enabled. Healthcare organizations favor hybrid cloud deployment more than any other sector surveyed. There is an uptick in private cloud installations, public cloud usage, and legacy data center architecture decommissioning.

Notably, healthcare organizations still value keeping specific applications on-premises. The survey finds that a growing number of healthcare organizations (51%) have repatriated to on-premises workloads, while 33% of respondents are looking forward to it for various reasons such as cloud security incidents and difficulty/inability to meet compliance requirements. Respondents indicated—by a significant margin compared to other industries’ average—that they are running more applications/IT resources on-premises this year than the last and plan to run more next year at increased levels that also outpace the global average.

Healthcare organizations cited security features as a top factor for IT purchase decisions, followed by data reliability and initial cost. They also cited cost advantage as an impeding factor compared to other industries polled when deciding what IT infrastructures to deploy. Nearly all users across all segments rated security and compliance capabilities as very important or important in cloud vendor selection.

In this survey analysis, Frost & Sullivan offers insights into cloud adoption challenges and roadmap, healthcare providers’ hybrid/multicloud implementation plans, cloud vendor capabilities they prioritize, current market trends, and growth opportunities for industry stakeholders.

Author: Rishi Pathak