As IBM Blue Box continues its destiny to evangelize our offerings across industry segments, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of our HIPAA-enabled Blue Box Dedicated offering. Healthcare workloads, governed by HIPAA regulatory requirements, now have a place to call home.
The role of the cloud in healthcare is changing—it’s maturing and becoming the platform for innovation and business value. The first phase of the cloud was all around cost— we wanted cheap compute and cheap storage. Cloud computing that powers dynamic infrastructures, to improve agility and scale—to fully utilize IT resources to improve operations.
This is perfect timing in the marketplace for customers who want an open platform by design (OpenStack) that also enables healthcare HIPAA workloads. Just in the past few years alone, customers have reconciled many privacy and security concerns, and cloud adoption has soared. For IBM customers, this has been in part due to IBM’s cloud governance and controls at the center of our service delivery.
A true tipping point—this is where even companies in regulated industries are adopting cloud solutions. The benefits are clear:
- Speed of adoption and access to latest capabilities
- Ability to deploy scarce IT resources to other high-value efforts
- Financial flexibility to move capital expense to operating expense
- Opportunity to grow and scale businesses across organizational boundaries and geographic lines
IBM Blue Box delivers our cloud services with security-rich design principles that are built from the ground up—from logical and physical architecture, to software design and operations, through to end-user delivery.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
Customers in regulated industries have similar needs when they consider a cloud solution. They want to understand security models in place, and how they’ll safeguard data. They want to see how these controls apply to their industry regulations. They want to know that independent audit processes are in place to assure controls are being implemented as designed. And, they want to understand privacy policies.
The IBM Blue Box Dedicated HIPAA offering addresses these requirements for the healthcare space. We’re now able to enter into a BAA (Business Associate Agreement) with organizations who seek the economics and agility of cloud, but must ensure that the infrastructure on which their applications run has the controls in places to support HIPAA compliance.
This offering is available in all IBM Cloud data centers that are Blue Box Dedicated ready.
It’s an important milestone, and IBM Blue Box looks forward to further helping our healthcare clients as they meet the many demands and opportunities of their industry.
Date: March 31, 2016