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The healthcare industry in the Asia Pacific is found to pose a promising future for cloud computing adoption, according to recent survey findings of IDC Health Insights.

Titled "Cloud computing in healthcare: An Asia/Pacific view" (April 2012), the survey found that 69% of IT decision makers in the APAC indicated that they currently have budget assigned to cloud computing. In the next three years, none of them have intentions to reduce cloud spending while more than half of them have intentions to spend more.

The survey was conducted on China, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Australia, and New Zealand in between November and December of 2011.

Healthcare service providers in the APAC are found to be looking at cloud adoption beyond short-term benefits such as pay-per-use models, no implementation costs, and out-of-the-box features.

"The healthcare industry is waking up to the benefits of cloud architectures in solving their human resource issues, and helping them in their strategic business goals of improving patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes, and providing collaborative healthcare," said Sash Mukherjee, senior market analyst for IDC Health Insights Asia/Pacific.

While there are differences in the mindsets in different countries, the overriding concerns regarding cloud technology remains security and connectivity.

However, smaller healthcare organizations that outsource their IT functions anyway, may in fact benefit from standardized cloud offerings that already have some compliance stamps.

The study also showed that server and storage capacity on demand are the key areas of cloud uptake in the healthcare industry, reflecting the huge volume of structured and unstructured data that patient-centric care generates.

But when it comes to industry-specific applications, picture archiving is not an area where cloud technology is being considered. Reflecting the increasing need for providing collaborative healthcare, solutions like electronic health records (EHR) and telemedicine are seeing increased cloud uptake.