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Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

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Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#11
post #9
post #4

The first company that gets to a certified HIPAA and PCI hosting cloud is going to have to figure out what to do with the buckets of cash they have lying around. I think for the enterprise PCI certification will be the event that gets the big (non-tech) guys out of running their own infrastructure. I would imagine that it would be the same for medical. As for you immediate question, I am sorry I can't help I don't kn…

As a point of clarification... HIPPA is a federal law. PCI is an industry standard (VISA, Mastercard, etc). That does not mean one is better than the other, I just wanted to clarify.

Yes, I am aware of the difference but thanks for the clarification. My point was more to the fact that a specialized cloud provider could really fill a needed void here on both counts.

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#12

No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosting plan. I'd say check out a company like Rackspace (disclosure: I work there).

depends on what "shared hosting" really means I think that's the key. My employer hopes that a virtual machine on a private VLAN, with a fully-encrypted virtual disk, qualifies. This seems reasonable to me, but reasonableness isn't necessarily a part of any regulation.

FWIW, I think I recall the OpenBSD devs coming out pretty hard against considering a VPS to be "secure" in most senses of the word; they seem to have thought that there were theoretical ways for VPSs to on the same machine to break through their respective barriers.

I can't find any links about this though and it's been months since I've kept up on OpenBSD-misc, so I might be full of shit.

Personally, I would tend to choose a theoretically-insecure VPS over a vhost environment any day.

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#13
post #3

No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosting plan. I'd say check out a company like Rackspace (disclosure: I work there).

Happy to use Rackspace or another dedicated server provider... the trick is that we don't want to be responsible for, say, security patches to the kernel. So really the question is: is there a company that'll manage the damn server(s) for us so that we get to deal with a nice, clean abstraction similar to shared hosting? Basically I want a HIPAA-compliant Heroku (though in this case not for Ruby).

There are plenty of companies that will do this for you, probably from about $250 per month; what I would recommend is a reasonably powerful dedicated machine on which you install your own VPS solution.

Give one large VPS to your production app, and create other VPSes for testing or development purposes.

The reason you want to use a VPS on top of your own dedicated hardware is to gain the benefits of VPS control, including easy archiving of the entire system, snapshots, easy moves to new hardware even if the hardware is different, etc.

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#14
post #3

No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosting plan. I'd say check out a company like Rackspace (disclosure: I work there).

Happy to use Rackspace or another dedicated server provider... the trick is that we don't want to be responsible for, say, security patches to the kernel. So really the question is: is there a company that'll manage the damn server(s) for us so that we get to deal with a nice, clean abstraction similar to shared hosting? Basically I want a HIPAA-compliant Heroku (though in this case not for Ruby).

The company we use, Rimuhosting, has sysadmin services available at $40/hr, which is pretty reasonable. Their dedi-server plans are reasonable as well.

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#15

No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosting plan. I'd say check out a company like Rackspace (disclosure: I work there).

depends on what "shared hosting" really means I think that's the key. My employer hopes that a virtual machine on a private VLAN, with a fully-encrypted virtual disk, qualifies. This seems reasonable to me, but reasonableness isn't necessarily a part of any regulation.

I don't know of a specific rule that prevents shared hosting - and if you do, I'd love to see it (as I mentioned, by company is in the middle of a similar process). What is clear is that you have to document access and changes, which could be trickier in a shared hosting environment. But if the host itself has processes in place, and documents them to you, you should be fine.

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#16
post #7

Had to research this before. Firehost is one of the names that came up often: http://www.firehost.com/secure-hosting/hipaa Their plans start from $845 monthly. No affiliation, just passing info along. You can't just rely on the provider though. All the server hardening in the world wouldn't help with apps that don't comply fully. Some of the audit requirements are bound to be very specific to the nature of your app.

I was curious what $845/month got you, so just for fun I looked. From the features part of that page:

1. Log Monitoring and Management: Not sure what they mean by this; surely it's something more complex than logrotate. Maybe rsyslog or something?

2. Continuous Vulnerability Monitoring: So, they follow the usual script sites & mailing lists.

3. Managed Anti-Virus Protection: I hope they aren't running on a Windows platform, and if they aren't, I'm not aware of very many current in-the-wild viruses for the various Linux distros.

4. 1 Gigabit Networking Infrastructure (Public and Private): Heh.

5. Two-Factor Authentication: I see this a bit, and it's usually mis-used. Unless they require you to physically submit a fingerprint, DNA sample, retinal image, or some other such thing, then it's not two-factor authentication.

6. Application and Database Server Isolation: They're running the application and the SQL instances on different servers, but if the application server gets compromised, then so does the SQL server, since the application needs automated credentials for the SQL server.

7. Managed SSL Service: Once a year they make sure your certificate is up-to-date.

8. Business Associate Agreement Friendly: What?

9. Managed Redundant Firewall Protection: Not sure what they mean by this. Either your firewall works, or it doesn't. Layering them doesn't do squat. If they mean that they have a hot spare ready to go in case of an outage, then that's a little better -- but still not that helpful if the app server or db server falls over for any reason.

10. Managed Redundant Web Application Protection (Port 80/443): What?

11. Managed Redundant DoS/DDoS Mitigation: This is nice, at least, since it requires a bit of infrastructure to do it right -- assuming that they can stand up to a multi-terabit-per-second hit, since that's what the botnets are packing these days.

12. Managed and Monitored Intrusion Detection: So, run-of-the-mill IDS + Nagios + remote logging.

13. Managed Proactive Operating System Security Patches: This is a lie unless they're personally writing and submitting patches. The most "proactive" you're likely to get otherwise is running a nightly update.

14. Managed Weekly Full Backups + Daily Differentials (Encrypted): I want to take just a moment here and toot our own horn: we do weekly fulls + daily differentials for our regular web hosting customers, for a heck of a lot less than $845 a month. They aren't currently encrypted, but that wouldn't be all that challenging to add on.

15: Highly Secure Data Center Environment: You can probably get the same "highly secure data center environment" from Rackspace, Hurricane Electric, or any of a number of other really big hosting providers.

16: VPN/SSL Provided for Server Management (RDP/SSH/FTP/SQL): Nice, but again, really not that hard to set up, especially for a turn-key environment.

TL;DR: I'm really surprised both at what qualifies as "HIPAA compliant hosting" as well as at the price charged for it. I wonder if the bulk of the cost goes towards paperwork or some other kind of administrative overhead? I certainly don't see the price reflected in their technical offering.

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#17
Depending on your fit/needs, it may be worthwhile to check out if the end client would like to maintain this box. That way, you are on their network. The disadvantage is of course the administration.

We did this on a pilot project with one of our clients with hipaa requirements. We asked for box with the minimum requirements with admin/firewall setup and used this server as our end point for our app. hope this helps.

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#18
Lightcrest is a complex managed hosting provider that works with clients to ensure HIPAA compliance. We build fully managed environments (servers, storage, network, physical security) and work with application developers and management on a variety of compliance issues.

http://www.lightcrest.com

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#19
I work for a managed infrastructure firm that specializes in scaling out secure platforms for customers that require HIPAA compliance - might want to check it out.

http://www.lightcrest.com/security/hipaa

Ex Myspace/Microsoft folks - lots of in house experience building high-volume sites that get pounded with malicious traffic.

Cheers

Re: Ask HN: HIPAA Hosting?

#20
post #7

Had to research this before. Firehost is one of the names that came up often: http://www.firehost.com/secure-hosting/hipaa Their plans start from $845 monthly. No affiliation, just passing info along. You can't just rely on the provider though. All the server hardening in the world wouldn't help with apps that don't comply fully. Some of the audit requirements are bound to be very specific to the nature of your app.

I was curious what $845/month got you, so just for fun I looked. From the features part of that page: 1. Log Monitoring and Management: Not sure what they mean by this; surely it's something more complex than logrotate. Maybe rsyslog or something? 2. Continuous Vulnerability Monitoring: So, they follow the usual script sites & mailing lists. 3. Managed Anti-Virus Protection: I hope they aren't running on a Windows pl…

"Highly Secure Data Center Environment", but no SAS70 certification... hmm.
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