Cloudticity Blog

Everything you do in your AWS environment creates a log, and every log plays an important role in keeping your customers’ data safe. If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you know that having the ability to store, analyze, and retrieve these records is crucial for security and compliance purposes.

HITRUST certification is many things. It’s a shortcut to securing your system against the danger of data breaches; a process for ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other regulations; and a competitive edge for your business in the increasingly crowded healthcare information security space. One thing it is definitely not, however, is an easy accomplishment.

In the world of healthcare security, regulations, and compliance, HIPAA and HITRUST are often seen as being the same. Actually, though HIPAA compliance and HITRUST certification are not interchangeable, they are certainly related.

Logs are crucial component of virtually any network. From recording data retrievals and monitoring traffic to keeping track of updates and flagging errors, every action that takes place in your AWS environment creates a log.

Thanks to our expanded library of Oxygen automated compliance checks, your AWS environment has gotten even more secure.

More and more healthcare organizations are discovering that HITRUST certification is critical to their success. While it’s not mandated, many providers and payers require their vendors be HITRUST certified. Because of the rigor of the process, certification also offers a competitive advantage for organizations that attain it.

Now that you are acquainted with HITRUST and have chosen to continue your journey, I want to thank you again for being proactive! If this is your first compliance series post, please start below:

• If you are new to HITRUST, start here.
  • To get a complete picture of the HITRUST Maturity Model and get some helpful tips from Cloudticity's experience, read this blog post.
• If you need more information on Cloudticity Oxygen, start here.
  • Interested in how Cloudticity Oxygen alerts map to HITRUST? Check out this blog post.

For everyone else, each month we (usually) look into at least one Cloudticity Oxygen service or feature, focusing on how it helps achieve HITRUST controls. This month is slightly different! Our last full HITRUST audit happened in 2017; we have now begun our updated full HITRUST audit based on a substantially updated set of controls, thus we want to share our new experience with you. Stay tuned next month for more Cloudticity Oxygen services or experiences.

Now that you are acquainted with HITRUST and have chosen to continue your journey, I want to thank you again for being proactive! If this is your first compliance series post, please start below:

• If you are new to HITRUST, start here.
  • To get a complete picture of the HITRUST Maturity Model and get some helpful tips from Cloudticity's experience, read this blog post.
• If you need more information on Cloudticity Oxygen, start here.

For everyone else, each month we look into at least one Cloudticity Oxygen service or feature, focusing on how it helps achieve HITRUST controls. This month we are diving into Cloudticity Oxygen alerts. Stay tuned next month for more Cloudticity Oxygen services.

I want to thank you for being proactive by beginning or continuing your HITRUST journey!

• If you are new to HITRUST, start here.
• If you are new to Cloudticity Oxygen, start here.

For everyone else, each month I will introduce you to at least one Cloudticity Oxygen service or feature, focusing on how it helps achieve HITRUST controls. This month we need to dive into HITRUST's expectations (5 Areas of the HITRUST Maturity Model) and focus on the big picture (Cloudticity's Experience: Setting the Stage). Next month we will dive into Cloudticity Oxygen alerts and our workflow.

Cloudticity's passion toward meeting security and compliance standards has led us down many paths over the past few years due to the ever-changing landscape of Healthcare and AWS. Let's reflect:

Within the HIPAA Security Rule are Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards. These safeguards are as important to understand as they are to implement, so let’s dive into one:

164.312(e)(1) - Transmission Security . Implement technical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to electronic protected health information that is being transmitted over an electronic communications network.

Today's risk management reality

Serving the healthcare industry can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, healthcare vendors have the privilege to participate in something that actually makes the world a better place - helping people lead healthier lives, and helping them get better when they're sick. On the other hand, the healthcare industry rightfully comes with a significant responsibility toward privacy, security, and governance. Vendors are saddled with filling in yet another 250-line Excel security questionnaire every time they want to be considered for a new project, and often have to execute multiple assessments for various regulatory frameworks as HIPAA, SOC 2, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, and MARS-E, to name just a few.

Within the HIPAA Security Rule are Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards. These safeguards are as important to understand as they are to implement, so let’s dive into one:

Within the HIPAA Security Rule are Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards. These safeguards are as important to understand as they are to implement, so let’s dive into one:

Within the HIPAA Security Rule are Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards. These safeguards are as important to understand as they are to implement, so let’s dive into one:

Reserved Instances (RIs) provide substantial savings compared to On-Demand pricing, and provide immediate savings opportunities for most companies. This blog post explores the fundamentals of RIs, and provides advice on how to get the most out of reservations. Managing RIs is complex considering the many types, levels of pricing, and rules around usage. Therefore, understanding the RI mix is essential to optimizing AWS usage costs. We asked Parquantix to help outline some important considerations when purchasing RIs. Parquantix manages more than $40 million in AWS reservations worldwide.

I had the privilege of being asked to speak at the HITRUST Annual Conference this week. In addition to being amazed at the quality of leadership this conference attracts, I noticed a few recurring themes:

Within the HIPAA Security Rule are Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards. These safeguards are as important to understand as they are to implement, so let’s dive into one:

How Verge Health leverages automation to provide a mission critical, HIPAA-compliant, 24x7x365 health solution on AWS.

For A Limited Time, Healthcare Organizations Can Automatically Check Their AWS Environments’ HIPAA Compliance At No Charge

SEATTLE -- Cloudticity, a leading provider of HIPAA-compliant managed services for AWS, announced today that it has released an automated tool for healthcare organizations to execute a HIPAA technical assessment on their Amazon Web Services accounts for HIPAA compliance. In doing so, Cloudticity is continuing their mission to improve healthcare by providing a growing list of security, compliance, and management tools to the industry. Executing the automated compliance check takes five minutes, and is complete within five hours.

We're proud of our Cloudticity team members Uri Katsir and Thomas Zinn for their guest-post on the AWS Management Tools blog, "How Cloudticity Automates Security Patches for Linux and Windows using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and AWS Step Functions."

Our customer Verge Health empowers more than 900 healthcare organizations to proactively protect and defend patients, caregivers, and organizations against errors, adverse events, and policy violations in order to achieve optimal quality and safety results. Their Converge Platform is a comprehensive, enterprise software solution offering a secure workspace with built-in workflow for high-risk and high-liability data. With Converge, hospital systems have a cross-functional, proactive surveillance tool that is always on—highlighting issues and supporting a rapid response to any and all events.

What makes Cloudticity different from the slew of AWS partners out there? At the core, it's our culture. It what lets us win time and time again, over bigger, badder, bloated competitors.

Our team is productive, happy, healthy, and totally focused on keeping our customers secure, highly available, performance, and cost-optimized.

We're honored that AWS recently posted an article on the Amazon Partner Network blog about Cloudticity's advanced automation for Cloudticity Oxygen™. Cloudticity Oxygen is a purpose-built managed services platform specifically designed to help healthcare organizations stay HIPAA compliant on AWS with 24x7x365 support, incident management, continuous compliance monitoring, automated remediation of problems, and a bulletproof security operations center.

It was an honor to be asked to present the first session on HIPAA compliance ever at AWS re:Invent. Check out the video of my  joint presentation with Mark Wellscott, Director of Application Development at Spectrum Health, where we talked about bringing their patient portal live on AWS. We solved some tough issues, including security, EHR integration, and DevOps concerns around automated deployments.