A Microsoft partner for more than 15 years, Project Hosts is an industry-leading expert in Azure and a Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform competent Cloud Service Provider (CSP) specializing in securing applications, data, and workloads in Microsoft Azure while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards, including HIPAA, HITRUST, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and DoD IL 4/5. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with offices in Pennsylvania and Maryland, Project Hosts offers compliant hosting services for the federal government, healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and commercial enterprises around the globe. With a successful history in secure hosting and managed services combined with an extensive understanding of Microsoft Azure, Project Hosts provides companies with a cloud partner that can manage their Azure migrations, with both security and compliance playing a critical role in the process. For healthcare organizations, the company’s “Turkey Healthcare Compliant Cloud” on Microsoft Azure solution enables healthcare providers, payers, medical device companies, and ISVs to move their on-premises applications and workloads to the cloud with full HIPAA compliance and HITRUST certification—quickly, cleanly, and affordably. A modestly sized SMB with under 100 employees, Project Hosts is just one of seven exclusive companies in the world to have been granted DoD IL5 authorization.
Trending Toward the Cloud
For both private commercial enterprises and public sector entities over the past five to ten years, cloud adoption has gained considerable traction and accelerated rapidly, for many of the reasons you would expect: significant cost savings due to consumption-based pricing; greater flexibility and scalability; improved data security; ability for smaller businesses to affordably access world-class technologies; and lower IT and maintenance costs, just to name a few. And indeed, over the last decade since becoming mainstream, the cloud has dramatically altered the competitive—and economic—landscape for businesses worldwide.
In the healthcare sector, however, a different story emerges. Here, cloud adoption has typically lagged behind other industries despite widespread recognition of the benefits of digital transformation. But this, finally, is changing. Today, the top IT trends for healthcare signify an increasing shift from on-premises solutions to the cloud, for similar reasons as other sectors: improved IT economics; security and compliance; greater flexibility in IT resource allocation; and the growing role of IT in helping healthcare organizations achieve their business goals and maximize ROI. Of these, cloud security and compliance is the trickiest area to navigate, for no small reason: non-compliance can mean criminal and civil penalties reaching upwards of $1.5 million per incident, per year. But that, too, is changing, thanks to turnkey, Azure-based security from Project Hosts.
A Healthy Option and Adoption for Medical Device Companies
One of Project Hosts’ Medical Device customers was seeking a Cloud Service Provider with proven Azure expertise to help them achieve and maintain security and compliance while developing their new global home dialysis solution. The company’s goal was to develop the application in a consolidated cloud environment, which meant that this environment needed to be secure, HIPAA compliant, and HITRUST certified. Since they were designing their cloud-based home dialysis service as a PaaS solution, monitoring logins and access to the various PaaS tools and services on Microsoft Azure was imperative because this service dealt with Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII)—two types of data that healthcare organizations are required by law to keep secure. On top of that, they also needed to maintain some of the servers on-premises, which further complicated the design and architecture of the deployment.
To address these complex challenges and meet the mandated requirements, Project Hosts was engaged to serve as an extension of their IT department. This allowed our customer to allocate more resources toward developing their innovative remote health service, which included making adaptations to its medical devices and software applications.
Since the Turnkey Healthcare Compliant Cloud on Microsoft Azure solution from Project Hosts extends HITRUST certification to the PaaS and SaaS levels by design, our customer immediately had a turnkey solution for securing PHI and implementing their cloud-based service without having to incur the effort and expenses typically required to design, implement, document, and audit the application-level security controls required for full regulatory compliance. By working with Project Hosts, the otherwise convoluted and time-consuming process for achieving compliance with healthcare information security standards was dramatically streamlined, allowing the customer to focus on mission-critical development tasks through its digital transformation—and leaving the provisioning, continuous monitoring, and ongoing compliance to Project Hosts.
