Peak 10, Concerto Achieve HIPAA Compliant Healthcare Cloud

December 21, 2016 - Cloud vendors are becoming more healthcare oriented with th Peak 10 and Concerto as the latest examples of IT companies announcing renewed HIPAA-compliant solutions. 

Peak 10 announced its newly acquired Privacy Shield certification, which replaces the now invalidated safe harbor regulation — in addition to receiving final reports for SOC1, SOC2, SOC3 and HIPAA. It also renewed certifications for PCI DSS and ISO 27001.

"One of Peak 10's foundational pillars is to carefully adhere to industry-specific standards and provide our customers with the best protection of their critical data and applications," said David Kidd, Vice President of Governance, Risk and Compliance at Peak 10.  "Our continued efforts were demonstrated this year by the measures we took to safeguard and maintain the facilities, infrastructure and systems our customers depend on."

Peak 10’s renewed HIPAA compliance implements the necessary safeguards within its solutions to assist the healthcare industry in safely accessing their data.

Concerto Cloud Services also made an announcement earlier this month regarding the launch of their HIPAA-compliant healthcare cloud.

Concerto Cloud for Healthcare features built-in HIPAA compliance from organization applications to the the physical layer of the data center. Concerto Cloud for Healthcare has hybrid deployment capabilities with integrations across the Concerto private cloud, Microsoft Azure public cloud, and on-premise applications so organizations can choose the cloud service models that best suit their needs.

Concerto Cloud for Healthcare integrates with electronic health records (EHR), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and enterprise content management (ECM) applications; likewise, it offers automatic failover to ensure business continuity, protection from common distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, and single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. Concerto's on-premises compliance template also ensures all desktops are HIPAA compliant with each startup.

"Through years of serving healthcare customers and channel partners, we know this industry has been cautious to embrace the cloud because of concerns about data security, compliance and complexity," said Greg Pierce, Chief Cloud Officer at Concerto Cloud Services. "We also know that the healthcare system can be dramatically improved by the flexibility and cost-savings enabled by the cloud. We developed the Concerto Cloud for Healthcare from the ground up to address growing market demand to meet the unique and rigorous requirements of modern healthcare."

A recent Gartner report stated that healthcare organizations are more likely to choose cloud service models over traditional infrastructure technology as cloud becomes the standard technology.

“The general hype surrounding the cloud has begun to wane, with an ever increasing number of real-world experiences demonstrating the pros and cons of cloud computing,” Gartner analysts explained. “This is on par with adoption life cycles of other major technologies that move the healthcare industry forward. It creates an environment for continuous improvement of perceptions and helps the technology evolve to better serve healthcare.”

The increase of trust in cloud technology has inspired vendors to accommodate healthcare organizations by ensuring they meet with HIPAA rules and regulations. The HIPAA security rule requires all covered entities to conduct a risk assessment of their organization which includes cloud deployments. Organizations will have an easier time conducting a risk assessment if the cloud solution they deployed is already HIPAA compliant.

As the use of cloud computing evolves as a significant part of health IT infrastructure, more vendors will see the advantages and ensure their cloud solutions achieve and maintain HIPAA compliance. The flexibility and scalability of the cloud have much to offer the healthcare industry as organizations show interest in more advanced IT infrastructures.

Dig Deeper:

• Understanding HIPAA-Compliant Cloud Options for Health IT
• Connectria Certifies Microsoft Azure Hosted HIPAA Compliance