Nephophobia is a very rare mental disorder. It’s simply defined as a fear of clouds.
This phobia is even rarer among the world’s healthcare organizations. Cloud adoption is running full throttle. In fact, the healthcare cloud services market is expected to more than triple from 2015 to almost $10 billion next year, according to the MarketsandMarkets research firm. While the magnetism of the public cloud is strong, some healthcare organizations are still contemplating just how to get there. They may be looking over the offerings of traditional managed service providers (MSPs), thinking about going at it alone, or considering partnering with a healthcare-exclusive market leader for privacy, security, and compliance in the cloud. Let’s consider some of the pros and cons of each approach across several categories.
Healthcare Expertise
Healthcare organizations attempting to manage the security and compliance aspects of their cloud-based PHI often run into the same issue: there just isn’t enough staff, expertise, or hours in the day to do healthcare-specific security and compliance right. Other healthcare organizations acknowledge they need outside support and turn to traditional MSPs that generally have shallow experience across a number of different industries. While this business model makes them a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to security, it doesn’t cultivate the deep knowledge and experience needed to master the healthcare space. Knowledge gaps translate into security and compliance gaps, which lead to extravagant fines and penalties, potential legal action, or a brand-imploding data breach. If you’re going to invest in a third party, it pays to choose a vendor that’s deeply familiar with your specific needs in healthcare.
ClearDATA’s cloud computing platform is designed and developed exclusively for the healthcare industry to deliver the highest standards in privacy, security and compliance. Since the vast number of security and compliance requirements unique to healthcare under HIPAA, GDPR and other regulations and standards are beyond conventional mathematics, a healthcare-exclusive cloud provider with a long history of healthcare expertise may be the smartest way to go. With ClearDATA’s portfolio you’ll know you’re in good company as hundreds of other organizations have chosen to be our cloud partner, and continue to grow their businesses with ClearDATA’s expertise.
To inspire the utmost level of confidence in our clients, ClearDATA has HITRUST certification – the highest recognition of a comprehensive security framework that unifies standards and regulatory requirements from across the entire healthcare industry – and works continuously to maintain it.
But what does it mean for you?
- HITRUST 9.1 Certification advances healthcare privacy and security controls to include 36 different regulations including GDPR, FedRAMP and New York Security Standards. Nearly 60% more state regulations over version 8.0
- Achieving 9.1 certification comes with NIST certification concurrently. NIST is a government standard and often sought after by organizations who work with federal healthcare programs
- A HITRUST-certified MSP can provide guidance and consulting services for business reviews, migration roadmaps, and make suggestions for improving technology utilization or creating new efficiencies within the IT department.
HITRUST certification is the healthcare industry’s gold standard for PHI security and HIPAA compliance—and many traditional MSPs may lack it. Additionally DIYers often lack the rigor that comes with being HITRUST certified.
Is your BAA rated triple A?
As a healthcare organization, you probably know that a Business Associates Agreement (BAA) is required anytime you’re dealing with sensitive health care data. They are often hard to negotiate, and your business needs are unique so one size fits all probably won’t fit you. ClearDATA’s BAA is purposeful, and negotiated by us with you based upon the needs of your organization. It is a broad and comprehensive BAA that will save you having dozens of BAAs to keep up with. When organizations manage their own BAAs it requires managing multiple BAA for every third party. And it’s far reaching in its shared responsibility with you, making the burden of what you have to manage much less.
Take risks in life—not with PHI
There’s an achievable way to create an organization committed to a mentality of compliance, security, and privacy that protects all workloads. ClearDATA offers security tooling built into an automated, hardened healthcare-only platform that proactively overall attack surface. Because of our healthcare-exclusive expertise, we build our hardening standards with the defensive posture that every workload contains PHI/PII. If any alarming activity is targeted at any one of ClearDATA’s customers—wherever that’s happening—we put protections into place for ALL of our customers, so they also remain secure. It’s that kind of protection that is just not provided by most traditional MSPs.
MSPs shouldn’t stand behind a velvet rope
Traditional MSPs typically put their own API between their customer and the cloud, forcing you to go through them in order to do anything. That’s just adding one more layer, and a lot more costs. ClearDATA lets developers be creative in a secure and compliant manner within their environment by providing direct API access to the cloud. Our expertise is centered around keeping your environment safe and secure in the cloud throughout the entire lifecycle of your application—regardless of which public cloud you choose.
A sandbox with sturdy walls
When it comes to innovation, security and compliance are like the little brother who wants to join his teenage sibling and his friends for touch football—it’s just not going to be as much fun because you always worry about him getting hurt. That’s why ClearDATA offers Automated Safeguards for AWS, Azure, and GCP. They allow you to use the cloud to develop and create without putting compliance at risk and without altering the environment. Now there’s no reason security and compliance should stand in the way of innovation. For DIYers, all the tasks associated with remaining in compliance in a remote computing environment can quickly vacuum up scarce and expensive resources and employees. And there’s little hope of keeping up with the rapid innovation from the public clouds. As an example of the challenge, one cloud had more than 1,500 updates, features and services just last year. That kind of update onslaught can kick DIYers out of compliance very easily if they fail to monitor weekly updates, determine how this fit or affect their environment, decide if necessary adjustments need to be made to previously configured services and understanding how it all fits into various regulatory frameworks.
Do-it-yourselfers and jack-of-all-industries MSPs have a place in the cloud, but for healthcare—an industry that has already exposed more than 41% of the U.S. population’s protected health information in breaches (HIPAA Journal, 2018)—a higher standard is required. Healthcare organizations need a cloud computing company that’s HITRUST certified, healthcare exclusive, HIPAA compliant, and a heck of a lot more secure.
