5 takeaways from Rackspace’s assessment of cloud maturity in healthcare

With cloud maturity comes similarly advanced adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and increased cyber resilience. That’s according to a recent Rackspace survey of 325 health systems in the United States and Europe.

The company defined “cloud leaders” – roughly 15% of health systems – as those that have fully integrated cloud adoption into business strategy. Compared to their peers, these organizations are more confident they can protect core systems, less bound by the limits of legacy infrastructure, and farther along the AI implementation roadmap.

“A mature cloud strategy is really important. We’re seeing organizations be more intentional about where workloads live based on factors such as security, cost, and performance,” said Melissa Pettigrew, healthcare lead at Rackspace. “There’s been a shift from asking ‘Why move to the cloud?’ to ‘What belongs where in the cloud?’”

Here are five important takeaways from the report’s findings.

Repatriation is a sign of maturation. Only 8% of organizations hadn’t moved workloads from one cloud to another, or back onsite – and most of those organizations are actively considering it. For Pettigrew, repatriation is a sign of maturity, not cloud adoption stalling. In large part, this is because private cloud capabilities have caught up to the public cloud’s agility and scalability while retaining security, cost control, and reliability.

Cloud and AI go hand in hand. More than 70% of organizations report minimal AI use. As AI moves from experimentation to production, infrastructure is the “gating factor,” Pettigrew said. “You need workloads to run securely, cost effectively, and close to your sensitive data,” she added. “The challenge we hear a lot is that it’s the environment and not the model.”

Cloud-based EHR is coming. Though only 28% of organizations have currently moved EHR systems to the cloud, another 45% plan to do so within three years. This reflects healthcare’s longstanding trend where no one wants to be first, but then everyone angles to catch up, Pettigrew said. It especially makes sense if EHR vendors have their own cloud-hosting capabilities, since organizations won’t need to write another contract.

Technical debt is still a problem. Only 37% of organizations reported minimal dependency on legacy systems; this dependency impacts data integration, EHR modernization, and compliance. Pettigrew said a shift to the cloud can accelerate application rationalization, as smart organizations will evaluate every app in their portfolio to decide if it’s necessary. “The less complexity in your environment, and the more awareness of what you run, where, and why, the better.”

Business continuity is also a gap, but it’s closing. Healthcare has largely transitioned disaster recovery to the cloud (only 22% of organizations have no plans to do so). Business continuity hasn’t moved at the same pace, but that’s changing as organizations realize it’s a business problem and not just an IT problem. “Getting secure backups and clean copies of data is great, but you need somewhere to run it from,” Pettigrew said. “Cleaning, rebuilding, and gaining access can take weeks, if not months.”

Organizations may have trouble navigating to the shift to the cloud on their own, Pettigrew said. Vendor partners can help by designing cloud infrastructure that stands the test of time.

“It’s not just about where workloads sit today. It’s about creating something that will hold up as environments evolve,” she said. “It needs to be an intentional architecture, not a single cloud.”

Brian Eastwood is a Boston-based writer with more than 10 years of experience covering healthcare IT and healthcare delivery. He also writes about enterprise IT, consumer technology, and corporate leadership.