Security dominates as Middle East and Africa healthcare goes mobile
DUBAI: The Middle East and Africa (MEA) healthcare market is seeing the widespread deployment of mobile technologies, with the short-term outlook for the implementation of mobility within this space looking particularly strong. Indeed, a recently published report from IDC Health Insights shows that enterprise mobility will have penetrated over 80% of MEA healthcare organizations by 2017.
According to the report, which is based on IDC’s annual survey of the region’s CIO community, corporate smart devices have already been deployed by over one-third of MEA healthcare organizations, with another 50% planning to adopt them by 2017. Mobilizing enterprise applications, adopting mobile device management (MDM) solutions, and developing policies for enabling enterprise mobility are the top priorities of the IT executives that are planning to embrace mobility.
IT security remains the greatest concern for healthcare CIOs, with the surveyed IT leaders identifying insider threats and staff-related issues as their most critical security challenges.
These concerns are being further aggravated by insufficient budgets, the lack of mature security strategies, and a shortage of skilled IT security personnel.
“The need for a mobile healthcare workforce will be one of the key drivers of mobile technology investments in MEA over the coming years,” says Nino Giguashvili, lead research analyst for CEMA at IDC Health Insights. “In line with the rapidly-rising importance of enterprise mobilitywithin the MEA healthcare industry, mobile security will dominate investments in IT security solutions. Investments in MDM solutions will see particularly strong growth.”
IDC Health Insights’ recently published study ‘ MEA Healthcare Going Mobile: CIO Summit Survey Highlights’ (July 2015, Doc #EHI07X) highlights the key findings of IDC’s MEA CIO Summit Survey. It examines the adoption patterns of 3rd platform technologies (mobility, big data, cloud, and social media) and looks at the IT challenges across the healthcare vertical in the MEA region.