Industry Insights: ClearDATA Launches Next Evolution of Its Health Care Cloud

ClearDATA recently announced the next evolution of its health care-dedicated, HIPAA-compliant cloud-computing platform. The latest version will enhance ClearDATA’s offering in every major area, including performance/speed, security, compliance, reliability, and usability.

According to HIMSS, a vast majority of cloud users plan to expand their use yet many reported performance issues.

“As the volume of data grows exponentially, health care providers and application developers can no longer afford to rely solely on internal infrastructure, which is why so many are looking to the cloud,” says Matt Ferrari, Co-Founder & Former CTO of ClearDATA. “They want assurances, however, that the performance, reliability, and usability levels they’re used to from internal systems will be there, and that all protected health information will remain secure. The enhancements to our HIPAA-compliant cloud platform push the boundaries in all these areas.”

Among the most significant enhancements to the ClearDATA infrastructure are the following:

• High-Performance Storage: ClearDATA now offers both standard hard disk drive spinning disk and solid-state disk storage to offer faster access to data and applications. The standard storage offers superior performance, delivering extremely fast yet economical access that is ideally suited to primary storage. Two tiers of solid state storage allow organizations to choose the level of performance they require for various operations, such as near-immediate boot-up of applications, high-volume transaction processing or managing heavy traffic loads on Web servers, with performance levels guaranteed.
• Superior Compliance: With all the regulations required around the protection and preservation of health data, having airtight and encrypted data backup is critical. ClearDATA now uses advanced software from CommVault to ensure all compliance requirements are met, including encryption at-rest and in-transit. Among the advantages are agentless backup for virtual machines, up to 200% faster backups, custom reporting, end user self-service and better deduplication to increase backup speed while reducing storage requirements.
• Enhanced Security: ClearDATA has made a number of security enhancements that exceed HIPAA requirements to ensure that protected health information remains safe. Dedicated, fully configurable virtual firewalls built into every virtual machine are now available to organizations at no additional cost.

The network architecture has been significantly improved to allow rapid scaling to enterprise levels without compromising security. Internal servers have new enhanced log and threat management, as well as Security Incident and Event Monitoring. Even physical security has been heightened through the implementation of a new data center.

ClearDATA also introduced a new self-service customer portal that enables authorized users to create and destroy new virtual machines, interact with support ticketing and view billing invoices. The portal simplifies management while giving organizations a clear view of critical data around their cloud usage.

“As part of our ongoing commitment to our customers we have looked at every aspect of our offering and taken bold steps to keep the quality and reliability at the forefront of the industry,” Ferrari says. “Health care organizations today face many grave concerns. Worrying about their data in the cloud shouldn’t be one of them.”

Originally published March 20, 2015.

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