Maximizing Multicloud: Critical Steps for Healthcare, Public Sector, and Financial Services CIOs

Discover how organizations in the healthcare, public sector, and financial industries can maximize the benefits of a multicloud environment.

November 18, 2022

While organizations in key service industries have been slow to adopt a multicloud approach or take full advantage of its benefits, many have recognized the value. Wendy M Pfeiffer, CIO, Nutanix, details the opportunities and steps organizations in healthcare, the public sector, and financial industries must take to maximize the benefits of a multicloud environment. 

“Digital transformation” has taken on a new meaning in recent years — it no longer necessarily focuses on the transformation of companies themselves but their ecosystems. For example, when the pandemic hit, the societal transformation created existential threats to some businesses (i.e., restaurants). To survive, the businesses themselves did not transform, but their ecosystems did (i.e., restaurants started using third-party delivery systems). 

This ecosystem transformation also occurred across three top industries — healthcare, the public sector, and financial services. Specifically, we saw the healthcare industry shift heavily to telehealth, government agencies change requirements for manual processes like getting a driver’s license, and online banking surge. Key to these successful adjustments was the ability for companies and organizations to compute data from multiple sources or utilize a multicloud model. As an IT environment that embodies two or more different clouds — private and/or public — multicloud is currently the most used deployment model. 

To better understand where these three key industries currently stand in their multicloud journeys, the global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) from Nutanix surveyed IT professionals to uncover opinions, challenges, and trends unique to each industry. It also offers top takeaways and recommended next steps that CIOs should consider. 

See More: Cloud vs. the Edge? Key Strategies to Optimize Critical Distributed Applications

Healthcare CIOs: Extend On-premises Private Clouds to Public Clouds

Despite 90% of healthcare respondents considering multicloud as their ideal modelOpens a new window , its current adoption rate is 27% as the private cloud continues to prevail among healthcare organizations. Though this lower adoption rate may initially paint a picture of the healthcare industry struggling to advance its cloud strategies, there are several challenges healthcare organizations are up against in moving to multicloud. Some of them are security concerns, the IT skills gap, and cost management. 

The most significant challenge healthcare CIOs face when spearheading cloud journeys is the highly regulated nature of the healthcare industry. With compliance and patient privacy at the forefront of their IT deployment decisions, many have been uncertain about placing trust in public clouds. However, a dynamic, fluid multicloud infrastructure delivers the agility to make continual adjustments. It enables the use of public clouds as an on-demand, “dial-up” IT resource consumed and paid for only as used. Public clouds also make data and apps easily accessible to increasing numbers of remote, geographically dispersed employees and patients. Healthcare organizations stand to gain from multicloud, and extending on-premise private clouds to one or more public clouds for appropriate use cases is a fundamental first step they should take to reap the benefits of a multicloud environment. 

Public Sector CIOs: Explore Adopting Containers

Findings from the ECI show that more public sector organizations have adopted multicloud as a primary IT operating model. The global public education sub-sector reported the largest usage among all global ECI respondents, with 62% reporting using two or more public cloud platforms. Meanwhile, U.S. federal organizations reported higher-than-average adoption of multicloud as a primary IT operating model. These results point to momentum being key for public sector CIOs, and setting goals for improvement is a great way to keep that momentum going.

One area public sector CIOs can look to improve is application mobility or moving an application to a different IT infrastructure. Application mobility is critical to multicloud optimization as it gives IT the ability to manage the movement of applications and workloads quickly and easily across infrastructures. Despite this, application mobility is cited by 47% of public sector ECI respondents as a top multicloud challenge because it is time-consuming and costly. Adopting containers, which enable applications to run and move separately from other applications, is a great next step for these CIOs as they look to ease application mobility.  

Financial Services CIOs: Set Consistent Security Policies Across Clouds

When examining ECI responses specific to the financial services industry, fewer of its organizations have adopted multicloudOpens a new window than any other industry surveyed. The adoption rate in the financial services industry trails the global average by 10% but is expected to accelerate and double over the next three years from 26% to 56%. Like the healthcare industry, the financial services industry’s adoption rate lags due to significant challenges like heavy regulations, cross-border performance, managing costs, capacity planning, and application mobility. 

Among financial services ECI respondents, 31% are still operating non-cloud-enabled three-tier data centers as their only IT infrastructure. As reported by 50% of financial services ECI respondents, security is the biggest multicloud management challenge they deal with. To fully execute the multicloud vision, financial services CIOs should prioritize setting and enforcing security policies that are consistent across clouds. The complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge for financial services organizations, with 84% of respondents agreeing that success requires simpler management across multicloud infrastructures. 

Networking is a critical, but up until recently neglected, aspect of the multicloud journey. Organizations need a single, software-defined solution for managing all of their disparate networks, whether on-premise or in a public cloud. Nearly all financial services respondents (98%) have moved one or more applications to a new IT environment over the last 12 months. Faster application development (43%) was most often cited as the reason for the move, followed closely by security (42%), and integrating with cloud-native services (40%). Organizations across the financial sector clearly see the promise of multicloud but see consistent security policies as a hurdle. Once that hurdle is overcome, many organizations can take full advantage of the benefits multicloud brings.

In conclusion, with multicloud’s adoption expected to jump to 64% in the next three years across industries, the model is here to stay. Though different challenges face each industry, my fellow CIOs now have the experience necessary to make guiding decisions for their organizations while leading their IT teams to a successful multicloud operating model.

What steps have you taken to maximize the benefits of a multicloud environment in your organization? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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Wendy M. Pfeiffer
As the CIO of Nutanix, Wendy's focus on enterprise adoption of modern technologies fuels the company's global mission. Wendy also serves on the boards of Qualys, SADA Systems and the American Gaming Association (AGA). A consumer tech enthusiast, Wendy has led technology and operational functions for Robert Half, GoPro, Yahoo! and Cisco. Wendy was recently named one of the Top 25 CTO's of 2022, included in the Infrastructure Masons 100 and included on Technology Magazine's global roster of Top 100 Technology Executives.
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