Healthcare is no longer a stranger to the cloud. From accelerating important medical research to becoming an important disaster recovery tool, cloud migrations continue to prove their value.
“Organizations have had success in the cloud, and they’re comfortable migrating important workloads to public cloud providers,” says Roger Haney, CDW’s chief architect for software-defined infrastructure. “But they should be careful not to get complacent, because the cloud is evolving very rapidly along with other technologies. The public cloud capabilities of today are much more advanced than 10 years ago. If they don’t keep pace with this change, they may get left behind.”
A 2024 CDW survey of more than 900 IT decision-makers across multiple industries, including healthcare, found that many organizations have grown adept at moving multiple workloads to the cloud. More than 36% of respondents have moved one-quarter to one-half of their applications to the cloud, and nearly 75% of respondents said the benefits of the cloud have lived up to their expectations.
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“I actually find working in the cloud easier than it was 10 years ago because there are so many more tools and options, and so much more is cloud-native,” says Dee Baker, senior manager at CDW Advisory Services.
Greater reliability and recovery capabilities from the cloud are top business benefits, according to 57% of respondents, followed by greater access to data and applications for remote users (55%) and increased agility and efficiency (51%).
Though many respondents say they have clear visibility into their cloud spending, there is more to cloud management than just tracking, because “not everyone knows the best practices to control their costs,” Haney says.
READ MORE: Prepare for a secure, seamless cloud migration.
Security remains a focal point for cloud users: 68% of respondents cited security concerns as the most common reason for cloud repatriation. The most common security threat cited by respondents was data breaches.
However, other users have recognized security gains in their migration: More than 48% of respondents cited improved security as a benefit of moving to the public cloud.
“People now understand how cloud security works. It’s much more of a whitelist security capability,” Haney says. “You have to define what you allow through instead of what you deny. As people start to understand it, they see that it works differently, but it works just as well.”
