We have heard probably a zillion times that “data is the new oil.” Unlike traditional oil, this new oil is present everywhere.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a law designed to protect people’s data and applies to entities and business associates who deal with PII (personally identifiable information), which means any data that could potentially identify a specific individual. 

Any dataset containing information like name, Social Security number, driver’s license number, bank account number, passport number, home address, email address, etc., is PII. PII may be stored or present in any Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, databases, logs, etc., or processed through any application and needs to be protected with strict adherence to the law.

Architecting end-to-end HIPAA compliance for AWS workloads can be a challenge, let alone continuously monitoring and detecting HIPAA violations across “n” number of accounts. Many clients that are obligated to ensure that workloads are always compliant need to safeguard data confidentiality, integrity, and privacy while making the underlying data available for processing in the right form at the right time. 

The solution to the challenges of maintaining strict compliance with HIPAA is to have a user-friendly, SaaS-based tool that provides an in-depth view of AWS workloads. 

Voila! nOps does precisely that! 

nOps — already the best SaaS tool for monitoring infrastructure changes continuously to optimize resource utilization and cost — is now a full-fledged tool to identify HIPAA compliance risks. nOps recently launched its revamped HIPAA Readiness Dashboard, which automatically integrates with a customer’s workloads and provides dynamic results showcasing detailed HIPAA violations by cause in each AWS account.

The nOps HIPAA Readiness module caters to any customer irrespective of size and industry. Its immediate results provide customers with insights on any HIPAA compliance risks in AWS workloads that require remediation.

The nOps HIPAA module inspects the following aspects of an AWS infrastructure for adherence to compliance controls and rules:

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
  • Encryption.
  • Multi-factor authentication (MFA).
  • Access management.
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) posture.
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) logs.
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions.
  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots.
  • Open ports.
  • Enablement of AWS CloudTrail (CloudTrail).
  • AWS CloudTrail (CloudTrail).
  • AWS Config.

Most important, nOps customers can more confidently face HIPAA audits or inspections because they can quickly assess their HIPAA posture. nOps’s one-click download feature for its “point-in-time” reports can be used as “evidence submission” for audits.Want to learn how nOps can analyze your AWS workloads for HIPAA compliance?  Click here to get started with a free trial of nOps (or click here to sign in to nOps if you’re already a user).