Atlantic.Net Blog

 Is It Possible to Protect PHI in the Cloud?

The number of organizations adopting virtualized environments continues to grow in many industries, including health care[I]. Virtualization enables network flexibility that most healthcare organizations could benefit from, but many are held back by a lack of clarity about what virtualization is, and how it relates to HIPAA cloud.

A virtual environment is one in which a software layer, called a “hypervisor,” has been added to a physical server.  An operating system can then be loaded onto the hypervisor layer to create a “virtual machine” (VM), which is a software-defined server, and as such can do some things not possible with physical, hardware-dependent servers.  The hypervisor layer can determine the precise size and location of the server VMs or “instances” loaded onto it since it provides separation from the physical limitations of each piece of hardware.  As we will explore below, this can benefit organizations through increased agility and automation.

HIPAA compliance can be particularly scary for organizations, due to the implications of a breach of security inherent in health care, the complexity of the regulations, and the severity of potential fines.  Timely access to medical information can be a matter of life and death, but ensuring that information is accessible, portable, and renewable only covers Title I of the Act.  Title II, covering health care fraud and abuse, along with the enforcement-strengthening HITECH Act[II], imposes security and privacy rules on health care providers and the companies that support them. Compliance failures can result in fines of up to $1.5 million[III], and data breaches, which are increasingly common in healthcare[IV], can be even more expensive, particularly when reputational harm is considered.

Fortunately, virtualized environments can not only be HIPAA-compliant quickly but can make compliance easier.

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Organizations migrating to a new IT environment, such as the Cloud, should always give serious consideration to the security of that environment. But how secure is the Cloud? If you don’t know exactly what piece of hardware your private data is found on at a given time, how do you know it is secure?

For those relatively new to Cloud, the first thing to be aware of is that while some of the tools and methods used to secure a network and data in the Cloud are different, the basic principles are the same as for any other environment. The next thing to know is that because the Cloud runs in data centers staffed by experts in Cloud services, data stored in the Cloud is “probably more secure than conventionally stored data,” according to Quentin Hardy, former Deputy Technology Editor of the New York Times[i].

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