Global Healthcare Cloud User Survey, Q3 2024

Artificial Intelligence Growth and the Shift to Cloud-native Applications and Edge Computing Drive the Digital Transformation

The story for 2024 is artificial intelligence (AI). Businesses across industries are scrambling to determine how they can leverage AI, particularly generative AI (GenAI), to meet their business goals. Public cloud providers are at the forefront of the effort to accelerate AI adoption among customers by developing foundational models and user-friendly toolsets.

Cloud continues to be foremost on the list of technologies that global healthcare organizations care about to achieve their objectives, followed by AI and machine learning (ML). With improving operational efficiencies and growing revenues being on top of the minds of healthcare C-level executives, hybrid, multicloud, and edge deployments are expected to grow in 2025 and beyond.

With the public cloud as the foundation, organizations worldwide continue to push their digital transformation initiatives. While the trend favors the public cloud, healthcare providers increasingly use different options, including on-premises data centers and edge locations. They seek a sophisticated hybrid management platform to manage deployment across many infrastructures.

Healthcare organizations continue to grow their cloud strategies to meet urgent business goals, such as improved patient experiences and innovation. While healthcare organizations continue to embrace hybrid and multicloud configurations, the lack of skills and knowledge gaps are the biggest hurdles to adoption. To overcome these, organizations continue to turn to managed and professional services to implement their enterprise cloud and digital strategies. Third-party partners belong to an increasingly complex and expanding ecosystem of industry experts and technology and service providers.

Cloud choice has moved up the stack as more than 80% of healthcare executives said they have apps deployed on the public cloud (e.g., AWS, MS Azure, and GCP), while most plan to migrate legacy/non-cloud apps to cloud environments in the next 24 months. They prefer to use custom or independent service provider (ISV) application programming interfaces (APIs) to deploy legacy apps on modern cloud platforms.