Healthcare service providers now see cloud adoption beyond short-term benefits such as pay-per-use models, no implementation costs, and out-of-the-box features.

Security and connectivity issues remain the two major concerns for the healthcare industry and smaller healthcare organisations outsource their IT functions.

Server and storage capacity on demand are the key areas of cloud uptake in the healthcare industry and cloud technology is not being considered for the picture archiving area.

IDC Health Insights suggests cloud providers dispel the misconceptions and confusions in the minds of end-users especially around security to succeed in the healthcare market.

Cloud providers would also have to describe the relative advantages of private, public and hybrid clouds to end-users.