Microsoft recently announced a multi-year collaboration with IT services company Accenture and healthcare industry leader Kaiser Permanente to enhance its hosted cloud environment infrastructure that supports its 12.4 million members and more than
According to Julie Sweet, Accenture’s Chief Executive Officer, “Kaiser Permanente’s bold move to the cloud at speed and scale builds on its decades-long history of innovation. By collaborating with Accenture and Microsoft to re-platform digital assets and further leverage insights and intelligence, Kaiser Permanente is empowering their clinicians and patients to customize care with more and better data.”
Accenture has played a major role in healthcare providers’ recent focus on digital transformation, supplying both guidance and solutions to partner companies looking to improve patient experiences, ensure regulatory compliance, and deliver both virtual and value-based care by making a move to new cloud-based infrastructure. A historically risk-averse industry, healthcare providers have nonetheless seen the benefits of making a change in their daily operations, with many organizations anticipating significant long-term cost savings from reduced hardware, energy, maintenance, and support expenses.
In general, IT services companies that assist healthcare industry companies in moving on from outdated and increasingly inefficient legacy infrastructures have seen an explosion in growth over the past several years, with more than 87% of organizations polled by Nutanix’s 2nd annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report identifying hybrid cloud deployments as the ideal IT operating model. Many of the responding organizations are also looking to decrease traditional data center deployments by nearly 35% over the next 3 to 5 years.
Control over IT spending appears to be one of the leading causes driving cloud migration, with organizations using public cloud infrastructure reporting spending 26% of their annual IT budget in 2020. Cloud migration is often seen as essential to ensure secure data, networking services, and interoperability between different cloud providers. As the healthcare industry continues its move away from on-premises infrastructure, the opportunities for IT services companies, including giants like Accenture, to assist with migration and support are sure to grow along with them.
