Cleerly is a healthcare technology company leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to forge a new standard of prevention and care for heart disease – in pursuit of a world free from heart attacks. As a healthcare startup heavily indexed on leveraging cloud-based technology, Cleerly faced a number of challenges when it came to ensuring the security and compliance of their patient data.
The Challenge
At Cleerly’s inception, their small 4-person engineering team budgeted over 50% of their productivity for security and compliance-related activity, diminishing their capacity for product development and innovation. Moreover, Cleerly’s networking structure was not built to scale.
Meanwhile, Cleerly was unable to engage their target market – providers – without demonstration of strict security measures, including SOC 2 and HITRUST. Their leadership understood that pursuit of those certifications would entail a significant investment of time and money – potentially slowing their go-to-market ambitions.
“From an IT perspective, there’s a lot of concern about security and governance organizations inside of health systems,” said Nick Nieslanik, Chief Technology Officer at Cleerly. “So, our roadmap is focused on making it as easy as possible for health systems to trust us. They want to have a full menu of options available since their environment may be highly customized to their workflow needs and runs a combination of integrated systems. Every health system environment is unique in their needs, and we have to figure out how to be configurable enough to fit all of those needs – securely and as efficiently as possible.”
The Solution
Cleerly CTO researched opportunities to escalate growth and pursue demonstrable compliance and security, without slowing down his dev team. Ultimately, the company engaged ClearDATA, a healthcare-focused managed cloud, compliance, and cyber defense organization with a proven history of helping healthcare – especially startups – navigate the cloud amidst complex risk landscape. ClearDATA supported Cleerly with the expansion of their total addressable market (TAM) and reach new providers that required SOC 2. By leveraging ClearDATA’s certifications and support, Cleerly was able to accelerate the preparation for their SOC 2 certification by six months and execute within the first 12 months. In parallel, ClearDATA professional services helped facilitate scaling Amazon Web Service (AWS) environments.
The Results
By capitalizing on ClearDATA’s expertise and certifications, Cleerly was able to focus on product development and innovation instead of worrying about security and compliance. ClearDATA spun up a new account in AWS that could scale 10x, which allowed Cleerly to expand their engineering team and capacity. With ClearDATA’s help, Cleerly’s engineering team now spends 20% or less of their time on security and compliance-related activities, freeing them up to focus on innovation – getting closer to their mission of eradicating heart disease.
The ClearDATA CyberHealth platform provides Cleerly with automated safeguards that continually identify and remediate non-compliant actions triggered by changes to the environment. In turn, Cleerly’s brilliant technical team builds with the peace of mind that they are always adhering to the appropriate regulatory and data security laws – from GDPR compliance to simply ensuring they have the proper guardrails in place.
ClearDATA also provides Cleerly with hardened images that are built to CIS benchmarks and are automatically updated as new operating systems are released. This ensures that Cleerly’s infrastructure is always up to date and secure, helping to expand their engineering team,
Cleerly’s partnership with ClearDATA has provided them with the support they need to navigate the complex landscape of security and compliance in healthcare as they scale. With ClearDATA’s help, Cleerly has been able to expand their engineering team and focus on product development and innovation.
The automated safeguards provided by the ClearDATA CyberHealth platform give Cleerly the peace of mind they need to operate in the cloud while ensuring they remain compliant with all relevant regulations. With ClearDATA hardened images, Cleerly’s infrastructure is always up to date, secure and advancing the standard of cardiac health across the globe.
