Self-Service Infrastructure & Staying HIPAA Compliant

If your company does cloud computing in the medical field, then you know some additional challenges come with that. The main one is remaining HIPAA compliant while still rolling out new programs and updates within a reasonable time frame. Unfortunately, constantly going through the IT department can slow things down quite a bit. If you want to set up your own self-service infrastructure while staying HIPAA compliant, this guide is for you.

What Is a Self-Service Infrastructure?

The main goal of this type of infrastructure is to allow teams and individuals who work with cloud-based applications to directly update and maintain the system. Without the self-service ability, they’d need to wait for someone from IT to create space in the system for them to work. Depending on the scale of your cloud data, this could take a while.

A self-service infrastructure gets around this by offering premade templates that will easily fit within the current system. People working on applications can simply use these templates to make their changes and submit them independently without waiting for IT’s approval.

How Can It Help With HIPAA?

When it comes to working around HIPAA guidelines, self-service is invaluable because IT is much more involved in making sure new data doesn’t mess up the systems. The privacy of patient information is not something you can toy around with. Still, if you have preapproved templates that your IT team has made to comply with HIPAA’s guidelines, you won’t have anything to worry about when you need to make a quick change to a preexisting program.

How Can You Implement Your Own System?

Fortunately, setting up your own self-service infrastructure while staying HIPAA compliant is relatively easy to do on most modern cloud services. In fact, Microsoft Azure’s security and compliance services are built specifically for meeting HIPAA’s strict standards. So on top of your IT’s premade templates, with Azure, you can rest assured knowing that a small change won’t put your patients’ data into jeopardy with online hackers.