My Colleague Martin Sizemore had a great post this morning on Microsoft stepping up to the HIPAA Compliance challenge in the Cloud. In the post, which you can read here Martin talks about Microsoft’s recent announcement that support for HIPAA compliance is now avaliable for Windows Azure in addition to Office 365.
From Martin’s post
Microsoft has introduced support for HIPAA compliance in their cloud platform called Windows Azure. Microsoft will work with healthcare customers to comply with their own specific requirements and put in place a comprehensive compliance framework to meet HIPAA guidelines and secure a BAA for storing healthcare data in the cloud. Microsoft is committed to providing Windows Azure customers with detailed information about their security compliance programs to help customers make their own regulatory assessments, but they opened the door for building a new class of healthcare applications in the Azure cloud.
HIPAA and the HITECH Act are United States laws that apply to healthcare entities with access to patient information (called Protected Health Information, or PHI). In many circumstances, for a covered healthcare company to use a cloud service like Windows Azure, the service provider must agree in a written agreement to adhere to certain security and privacy provisions set forth in HIPAA and the HITECH Act. To help customers comply with HIPAA and the HITECH Act, Microsoft now offers Enterprise Agreement (volume licensing) customers a BAA as a contract addendum.
With Mobility and Cloud as hot topics in Healthcare right now, do you see this news driving faster Cloud adoption?
