Top 11 HIPAA Compliant Hosting Servers for Healthcare Apps

Does your business handle ‘Protected Health Information (PHI)’? Then, there are chances that your business will require HIPAA-compliant hosting cloud server.

If you are collecting, storing or transmitting PHI to a covered entity then you definitely should be HIPAA compliant.

We’ve identified a list of 11 best HIPAA compliant cloud storage providers updated for 2020 so healthcare software companies don’t have to go searching the web for a list as well as reviews (for the first/top 4 providers listed below).

AWS HIPAA Hosting is one of the most popular and trusted HIPAA compliant cloud storage servers for building healthcare apps. AWS has utility-based cloud services to process, store, and transmit Protected Health Information (PHI).

They sign a HIPAA business associate agreement (BAA) with you and provide you the physical server isolation you need. The BAA contract clarifies how your HIPAA obligations will be shared with AWS.

There’s back-end storage that can be mounted and you can fiddle with the amount of disk space. If you like, you can add EBS (Elastic Block Store), which is disk space that lives in the racks near you.

Customers can use any AWS service in HIPAA-compliant applications. However, only the HIPAA-eligible services defined in AWS’s BAA can be used to process, store, and transmit personally-identifiable patient data.

AWS’ BAA currently applies to 9 services.

Pricing: AWS pricing is based on the usage of individual services, so you only pay for what you use. Even then, prices might start at 0.016/hour.

Ratings and reviews:

InfoWorld: Amazon, the mother of all clouds

PC Mag: Editor rating for Amazon EC2: Good

Trustradius rating: 4.1/5

Cloudreviews editor rating: 5/5

Side Note: If you’re looking to build a HIPAA compliant platform or an application, Arkenea has 9+ years of experience as a healthcare software development company and can help you develop your HIPAA compliant project.

Rackspace provides three types of cloud servers: open, private, and hybrid cloud. The private cloud environment offers HIPAA ready hosting. They also hold a HITRUST CSF (common security framework) certification that confirms their adherence to the high levels of data privacy standards. They have decent hardware, 15+ operation systems, image backups, Raid 10, impressive scalability, and many other services.

To help customers meet their compliance requirements with regards to HIPAA, Rackspace offers a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) in their dedicated hosting services segments. The public cloud can be set up in two ways- a managed infrastructure level and a managed operations level with the former being the less expensive option.

Pricing: Offers utility based pricing costs with the option to choose from general purpose, compute optimized, I/O optimized and memory optimized resulting in consumption based pricing and billing.

Ratings and reviews:

PC MAG Editor rating: Excellent

Cloudreviews editor rating: 5/5

Related: Healthcare technology trends for 2020.

It calls itself ‘The cloud for modern business’. Microsoft Azure, formerly Windows Azure, is Redmond’s cloud computing platform.

Azure is a great competitor in the cloud application hosting arena, and it’s perfect if you’re hosting a .NET application. There are three main divisions of the Azure service: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS, or virtual machines), web hosting (for mostly static sites) and platform-as-a-service.

Azure is certified according to the many control frameworks that make up HITRUST, including HIPAA/HITECH and ISO 27001, providing a compliant foundation for healthcare industry customers, but the end-user solution is owned and managed by the Azure subscriber (and is thus not in-scope for Azure compliance processes).

Microsoft currently offers the HIPAA/ BAA to all US customers as part of their Online Services Terms (OST).

Pricing: Service runtime is billed on hourly basis and covers the compute supporting the RESTful API layer that sits on top of the backend storage ($0.40 per hour). Structured Storage is billed for each GB used for your SSD-backed data and index ($0.25/GB/month). Provisioned throughput per 100RU/s (request units per second) is at $0.008 per hour.

Ratings and reviews:

PC Mag’s Editors’ Choice for small business cloud services.

Cloudreviews editor rating: 4/5

Armor prides itself as the most comprehensive secure cloud inTrueVault handles all physical and technical safeguards required by HIPAAfrastructure to support HIPAA-compliant hosting needs.

Armor is certified against the Common Security Framework (CSF) from the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) to address HIPAA compliance requirements.

It is industry’s first true Compliance as a Service solution (Caas).

Caas is a complete solution that provides insight into everything required for compliance: secure infrastructure, gap analysis, remediation, audit, ongoing security & compliance monitoring, and incident response and forensics.

You can access Armor support via live chat, phone numbers, and ticketing service. They are also active in social media networks.

Pricing: Prices not disclosed. Offer a 30 second discovery tool that aligns the data workload to the hosting solution that meets security and compliance requirements.

Ratings and reviews:

Cloudreviews Editor and user rating: 4/5

Recommended Reading: Building A Telemedicine Platform For Your Practice: A Comprehensive Guide

Truevault is another good option for ensuring your application meets the HIPAA technical and physical safeguards.

Truevault is a HIPAA compliant cloud hosting API and secure data store. It has a secure API to store health data and handles all physical and technical safeguards required by HIPAA. TrueVault decouples consumer identity from consumer behavior to eliminate data security risks and compliance liabilities, giving companies only the data they need.

It will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with you upon account activation. This will ensure customer protection under a comprehensive Privacy and Data breach insurance policy.

It enables you to store and search protected health information (PHI) in any file format through RESTful APIs. It also provides user identity and access control for your application.

Pricing: It offers three pricing tiers for startup, business and enterprise which vary in the number of ops and identities offered.

Ratings and reviews: No reviews found

To verify your data is secured to HIPAA compliance standards the company provides technical controls, backup management, safeguards and physical security policies.

A Business Associate Agreement (BAA) is available upon request, which will require the acquisition of server configurations that meet minimum security requirements.

Suport: 24*7 support system in place; they call it HIPAA-trained Heroic Support® engineers.

Pricing: Single server hosting starts at $299 and $359 for Linux and Windows respectively. The price for multiple server hosting starts at $788 for Linux and $958 for Windows.

VM Racks, that launched HIPAA Vault, is a privately-held cloud service provider offering a full suite of HIPAA Compliant Solutions including hosting, email, sftp and more.

They have a trademarked solution called True HIPAA Compliance™ which they use to guarantee their cloud hosting packages are 100% HIPAA compliant and they sign BAA’s for all customers.

They support both Windows and Linux operating systems. The company provides services that deal with electronic patient health information (e-PHI) and electronic medical records (EMR).

All of their HIPAA Compliant plans include monitoring, hardening, scanning, patching, and server security. Support for desktop, Android, and Apple applications also allows for greater accessibility to important documents and information from virtually anywhere.

Support System: 24/7 support with every hosting plan.

Pricing: Basic plan starts at $199/month which includes 2 GB memory, 50 GB storage, 320 GB bandwidth and true HIPAA Compliance.

Atlantic offers a full range of HIPAA hosting and related HIPAA compliance products. You can choose for HIPAA compliant server hosting, but also for more specialized HIPAA compliant database hosting, application hosting or backups.

They offer custom-built HIPAA hosting solutions.

You can also decide to place your own servers in their HIPAA compliant data center. All of the products are combined with active and aggressive monitoring for security purposes.

Support: 24/7/365 Phone, Chat and Email Support.

Pricing: Offers numerous plans segregated by whether they are storage optimized, memory optimized or compute optimized.

Aptible enables your digital health organization to implement an entire HIPAA compliance program.

They run on deployment workflow, and their compliance validation engines streamline every component of the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules.

They provide comprehensive packages, including backups, audit trails, and even employee training.

Support: You can leave a mail or chat with them. They usually respond within an hour or so during business hours.

Pricing: Fully customised pricing plans based on your requirement as a part of aptible comply. Under aptible deploy, the development packs start at $0 while the production packs start at $999 per month.

Rating: 4.4 on G2.com

Catalyze, or now rebranded as Datica, is a HIPAA compliant cloud computing for healthcare apps. They offer two products: a backend-as-a-service (BaaS), or set of APIs to build compliant apps and a compliant platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for running custom applications and databases.

For both products, they provide logging, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, encryption (in-transit and at rest), IDS, file integrity logging, and vulnerability scanning. Datica is HITRUST Certified.

Support: You need to submit a ticket. Responses are sent within 24 hours. Existing customers typically receive a response in less than an hour during normal working hours.

Pricing: Offers compliant kubernetes service for ensuring compliance of patient data in the cloud. It also offers Datica integrate which is the industry’s first any-to-any solution for health data integration and compliance. The pricing quotation of both these solutions can obtained on call with the Datica team.

Connectria offers enterprise level HIPAA compliant hosting solutions. They offer HIPAA-compliant hosting for customers in the healthcare and dental industry or anyone who must comply with the HIPAA and HITECH Act security standards surrounding the storage of Protected Health Information (PHI).

Connectria has partnered up with TripWire to offer HIPAA compliance monitoring. They setup and manage HIPAA Compliant environments in their data centers, and also in HIPAA Compliant environments in AWS.

They are Business Associates Agreement (BAA) friendly, and routinely enter into Business Associates Agreements with our customers.

They have a pretty aggressive service level agreement (SLA) offering a 100% uptime guarantee as well as a 100% secure guarantee.

Support: Solutions Architects are available 7 days a week for assistance. You need to fill a form and they usually get back within 24 hours.

Pricing: Prices are based off your monthly cloud spend. Spend under $2k a month starts at $199 and upto $10k a month comes at $399 per month. If your spend exceeds $10k, the quotation can be obtained via consultation.

LightEdge, which aquired OnRamp’s fully-compliant HIPAA Foundation Solution, bundles the compliance-critical hardware and software features to help you meet HIPAA’s stringent compliance requirement.

Their offering comes with a whole range of HIPAA compliance service. OnRamp allows you to choose from 3 different HIPAA hosting solutions, with HIPAA foundation solution, HIPAA advanced solution, and HIPAA enterprise solution.

LightEdge has also developed a 3-Step HIPAA Risk Management Tool to easily diagnose, assess and manage any vulnerabilities and risks with implementing customers’ IT infrastructure at OnRamp.

Support: IT infrastructure and critical data backed support available for 24/7/365.

Pricing: Price on request.

New Entrant: Healthcare Blocks

Healthcare Blocks is a HIPAA-compliant application platform that powers healthcare technology systems of all sizes, from small startups to large medical groups.

They are partnered with and built on Amazon Web Services. They are Business Associates Agreement (BAA) friendly and don’t ask for any long-term contracts from the customers.

The platform is fully-managed by the Healthcare Blocks team and offers versatility, with most languages and databases supported.

Pricing: The startup package starts at $170 per month while the growth package starts at $1065 per month. The enterprise packages are available on request.

Support: Available via email, chat, and help desk website. Response time is usually less than 1 hour during normal business hours.