News
Western European Healthcare Providers Cautious About Budget Allocation to Cloud, According to IDC Health Insights Survey of IT Decision Markers
May 2012 by Marc Jacob
In a recent survey conducted across major healthcare organizations in Western Europe, IDC Health Insights found that IT budget allocation for cloud computing is generally not a priority for Western European healthcare providers. According to the survey results, only 6% of surveyed IT managers have more than 10% of their IT budget allocated to cloud computing initiatives.
The survey also reveals, however, that healthcare organizations across Europe are starting to seize the cloud opportunity, shifting away from traditional IT implementations supported by their own infrastructures to a new paradigm in which IT is available as a service. Key cloud initiatives underway are mainly private cloud based, owing to regulation and concerns about data security/protection and data handling privacy. Government investment in public sector cloud or G-Cloud is a catalyst for cloud growth in the healthcare sector. The creation of public-sector-specific infrastructures can help overcome legal issues around data protection, while ensuring enough scale and capability to achieve the expected benefits.
Key highlights of the survey include:
Increased IT system agility and improved investment efficiency are key drivers of adoption of cloud in healthcare.
Dynamic scalability allows faster deployment to end users, and the shared services model delivering more standardized IT systems is encouraging healthcare IT executives to consider cloud.
Security is still the biggest concern about public cloud. Western European healthcare CIOs believe the main issue deterring them from using a public cloud are the risks in keeping their system and information outside their firewall and being unable to comply with audit requirements set by national regulations.
"There is still a low propensity to allocate a significant share of the IT budget to the cloud, and the next 12 months will still be characterized by a toe-in-the-water approach," said Silvia Piai, EMEA research manager, IDC Health Insights. "But results show that healthcare organizations across Europe are aware of the potential benefits that cloud can deliver, and they are willing to explore it. Cloud can provide advantages in self-service, scalability, flexibility, pay-as-you-go, and improved time-to-value of technology, but European CIOs are also aware that before seizing the cloud opportunity they need to understand how to mitigate the implicit risks."
The survey is discussed in more detail in the report Cloud in the Western European Healthcare Sector: Trends and Strategies for 2012 and Beyond (IDC Health Insights #HIOH02U, March 2012). The report looks at the nature of current cloud environments and delivery model preferences (private, public, and hybrid), future plans for cloud deployments, which workloads and business processes are suitable for cloud, and cloud service type preferences. It also offers IDC Health Insights’ views on which steps need to be followed by healthcare providers while setting up their cloud strategy.
The report is available to purchase on www.idc.com.
