A Cloud-Smart Strategy for Modern Healthcare

Walk into a hospital or clinic today and you might see digital advancements everywhere: high-resolution imaging, telehealth visits, AI-assisted documentation. But behind the scenes, many IT teams are still running on aging infrastructure and a patchwork of systems that were never designed to work together.

The pressure to move to the cloud is real. However, while many industries rushed to adopt public cloud years ago, the healthcare industry has approached cloud with much more caution, shaped by strict privacy and security regulations.

That caution may prove to be an advantage. It gives healthcare IT leaders a chance to skip the costly trial-and-error phase that other industries experienced and go straight to a cloud-smart strategy, with a modern private cloud at the center.

A modern private cloud built on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is designed for exactly this moment.

Rethinking Cloud Strategy

According to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report, cloud strategy decisions are no longer a simple choice between public and private cloud. Instead, 93% of organizations say they run a mix of private and public cloud. The report is based on a global survey of 1,800 senior IT decision-makers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, spanning multiple industries—including healthcare.

Across all respondents, 53% say building new workloads in a private cloud is their top three-year cloud priority. For the healthcare industry, that number jumps to 62%.

Healthcare still uses public cloud where it makes sense, but it is leaning even more heavily into private cloud than the cross-industry average, treating private cloud as an anchor, and the public cloud as an extension. The reasons why say a lot about what healthcare needs from the cloud.

What Healthcare Needs from Private Cloud

Cost management

The Private Cloud Outlook 2025 data shows a serious ROI issue: 49% of organizations across industries believe that more than 25% of their public cloud spend is wasted, and 31% believe that the waste exceeds 50%.

Healthcare providers cannot afford this level of inefficiency. Many are already dealing with razor-thin margins, rising labor costs, and pressure to invest in new care models and digital capabilities. Wasted cloud spend directly hinders their ability to invest in clinical staff, cybersecurity, and patient services. The often unpredictable pricing of public cloud makes it even harder to control costs.

This is where VMware Cloud Foundation matters. VCF provides:

• Cost visibility and predictive cost modeling
• Granular showback and chargeback reporting, with deep visibility into resource consumption and costs
• Automated resource optimization that reclaims underutilized compute and storage resources, improving workload efficiency and reducing waste proactively

For a CFO or COO, this is the difference between “we think we’re saving money in the cloud” and “we can show where every dollar goes and what it supports.”

Stability and performance

Healthcare workloads carry some of the most demanding requirements in enterprise IT. They generate massive volumes of data from electronic health records (EHRs), imaging systems, connected medical devices, and more.

These workloads are also latency-sensitive and mission-critical. Clinical teams rely on fast, reliable access to EHRs, order entry, and medication administration systems. And because many environments still depend on legacy integrations, stability and interoperability remain essential.

These characteristics map directly to the strengths of a modern private cloud:

• Low latency and predictable performance for EHRs and other clinical applications
• Resilience and continuity with built-in redundancy, high availability, and disaster recovery
• Consistent governance and compliance across hospitals, clinics, and remote sites

VMware Cloud Foundation brings these capabilities together in a unified private cloud platform designed for complex, regulated environments like healthcare.

Tighter control of data and compliance

Security and compliance are top of mind across industries. The Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report shows that 92% of organizations trust private cloud for security and compliance needs. Healthcare follows the same logic but with higher stakes, given the sensitivity of PHI and a complex landscape of regional and national regulations.

A VCF-based private cloud provides the data control and sovereignty that healthcare organizations need to enforce consistent policies, segment sensitive workloads, and keep data where it needs to reside.

A Solid Foundation for AI-Assisted Healthcare

From predictive health analytics to personalized medicine, the potential for AI to advance healthcare is extraordinary. AI tools are already proving effective at reducing administrative burden, especially in documentation and coding. It’s no wonder that in 2024, 2 in 3 physicians were using health AI—up 78% from 2023. (Source: American Medical Association)

AI workloads intensify the challenges already facing healthcare IT: sensitive data, strict compliance mandates, and the need for predictable performance at scale. It makes sense that healthcare providers are leaning into private cloud for these advanced workloads.

According to the healthcare findings in Private Cloud Outlook 2025, 84% of healthcare providers use private cloud for a mix of traditional and modern applications, including AI. In that same slice, 55% say private cloud is their preferred environment for AI model training, tuning, and inferencing.

Private cloud can address the specific requirements of healthcare providers in ways that public cloud alone often cannot. VMware Cloud Foundation fulfills that potential by replacing rigid, siloed infrastructure with a unified platform that’s ready for any workload. It brings compute, storage, and networking together into a single software-defined platform—one that isolates sensitive workloads, enforces compliance, and scales to support everything from traditional healthcare apps to emerging AI workloads.

Ready for Any Workload, With Any Team Size

To recap, healthcare provider workloads share a few traits: they are resource-intensive, tightly integrated with on-premises systems, highly regulated, and subject to strict security and uptime requirements.

A modern private cloud built on VMware Cloud Foundation addresses these workload needs directly, delivering the following advantages.

Predictable performance and availability

• Software-defined compute, storage, and networking tuned for critical workloads
• Built-in high availability and disaster recovery capabilities

Operational consistency and automation

• One platform for provisioning, lifecycle management, and monitoring, with several automation features for leaner operating teams
• Standardized blueprints for EHR, imaging, VDI, and analytics environments

Data control and locality

• Keep PHI where regulations, contracts, or risk policies demand
• Support regional and edge deployments for care sites, clinics, and imaging centers

Consistent security and segmentation

• Micro-segmentation and zero-trust networking to isolate sensitive workloads
• Unified policies for encryption, access control, and compliance

These technology capabilities are essential, but they’re only part of the story. To realize the full value of a modern private cloud, healthcare organizations also need to rethink how their teams are structured and how work gets done.

Fixing the People and Process Side: From Silos to Platform Teams

The Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report calls out a familiar organizational problem: siloed IT teams.

Across all industries, 33% of respondents say siloed IT teams are the greatest challenge to private cloud adoption. At the same time, 81% say they are moving toward a platform team model instead of traditional technology silos.

If you’ve worked in healthcare IT, you’ve seen those silos up close: EHR teams, network and storage teams, security, imaging, clinical apps—all operating with different tools, processes, and priorities. It’s no surprise that spinning up a new environment or making a cross-cutting change can be slow and painful.

A modern private cloud platform like VCF gives organizations something concrete to organize around. Instead of each team owning its own stack, a cross-functional platform team owns the private cloud as a product and provides services to other teams.

This shift to platform-as-a-service doesn’t happen overnight. But the survey data suggests that organizations that move in this direction are better positioned to realize the full benefits of private cloud: agility, reliability, and cost control.

For healthcare, where IT talent is scarce and expectations from clinicians are high, that alignment can matter as much as the technology itself.

The Path Forward

If you’re ready to rethink your cloud strategy on healthcare’s terms, start by taking a closer look at the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 findings and your own environment. Then explore how VMware Cloud Foundation can help you design a private cloud that meets the challenges of modern healthcare and puts your organization in a stronger position for whatever comes next.