The Nutanix Healthcare Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report finds AI urgency is outpacing infrastructure readiness in the healthcare sector, amid rising Shadow AI risks.
Nutanix has published findings from the healthcare vertical edition of its eighth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey. The report, which examines infrastructure readiness, AI adoption, and containerization trends across healthcare organisations globally, reveals a sector under mounting pressure.
According to the report, AI deployment is being driven from the top, shadow AI is proliferating across clinical and administrative functions, and the infrastructure required to support secure, compliant AI workloads at the point of care is not yet in place.
As AI moves from the data centre to the bedside, where up to 75% of healthcare data is expected to be generated, the stakes around infrastructure readiness, data sovereignty, and clinical governance have never been higher. The report shows that while healthcare IT leaders recognize the transformative potential of AI, including through autonomous agents and real-time clinical decision support, the organizational and infrastructure gaps required to realise that potential remain significant.
“Clinicians are exhausted, and they’re turning to AI because they genuinely believe it can help them, and they’re right,” said Sammy Zoghlami, SVP EMEA at Nutanix. “But when 88% of healthcare organisations tell us their infrastructure isn’t ready to support AI on-premises, and nearly four in five are already encountering AI tools being deployed outside of IT oversight, that tells us that innovation is coming second to risk. The industry needs to get the foundations right before the gap between AI ambition and readiness becomes a patient safety issue.”
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AI Adoption vs Infrastructure Readiness in Healthcare
Shadow AI is widespread and largely unmanaged: 79% of healthcare organisations encounter AI applications or agents being implemented by employees in non-IT functions. 83% believe that AI tools and agents operating outside official oversight create business risk. The same proportion, 83%, say silos between business units and IT make it difficult to effectively execute technology initiatives, deepening the governance challenge as AI adoption scales.
Infrastructure is not ready for AI at the point of care: 88% of healthcare IT leaders view their current infrastructure as not fully ready to support deploying AI workloads on-premises.
AI is accelerating container adoption as healthcare modernizes its application strategy: 86% of healthcare organisations say AI is meaningfully accelerating their adoption of containers. 81% expect the level of application containerization to increase at their organisation. 80% are already building new applications in containers.
AI agents are seen as transformative for healthcare operations: 58% of healthcare IT leaders expect AI agents to improve productivity and efficiency. 57% anticipate agents will transform business processes and operations, and more than half (55%) see potential for AI agents to create new products, services, or revenue streams.
Data sovereignty is a must-have, not a nice-to-have: 72% of healthcare organisations say data sovereignty is a high priority or a must-include when making infrastructure decisions. 54% run containerized applications on-premises or on private clouds today, and 54% feel the need to run infrastructure within a single country due to customer or stakeholder expectations.
AI adoption is being driven from the top, with scale coming fast: 55% of healthcare organisations anticipate having more than five AI-enabled applications within three years, including 12% who expect to be running more than 10. 63% currently run AI applications on managed service providers, with hybrid deployment models expected to remain the norm as organisations look to support AI centrally and at the point of care.
Findings Conclusion: According to Nutanix healthcare organisations are accelerating into AI without the infrastructure beneath them to support it safely. Closing the gap from the data centre to the bedside requires a fundamental rethink of how healthcare IT is architected, governed, and scaled.
“Healthcare organisations across the Middle East are increasingly adopting Artificial Intelligence to improve patient outcomes, operational efficiency, and clinical innovation. However, many are finding that existing infrastructure is not built to support the demands of real-time, data-intensive AI workloads.
This year’s Healthcare Enterprise Cloud Index highlights the need for secure, scalable, and sovereign-ready digital infrastructure to support AI from the data centre to the point of care. Across the region, healthcare leaders are prioritising data residency, regulatory compliance, and fast access to clinical insights, making hybrid multicloud strategies more important.
Organisations that modernize their infrastructure now will be better positioned to adopt AI securely, accelerate innovation, and deliver more connected healthcare services,” said Assem Al Achkar, Public Sector Sales Manager, South Gulf, Nutanix.
Disclaimer: This is a vendor-commissioned study sponsored by Nutanix and conducted by Wakefield Research in November 2025. Readers are encouraged to review the full report for additional context, methodology, and detailed findings.
