Kubernetes Compliant Solutions Enable Healthcare Innovation

Last month I attended my sixth HIMSS with ClearDATA and I am sure I visited with some of you who are now reading this. It was an action-packed week with new emerging technologies taking the spotlight, most of them reliant on machine learning. It’s important to note that behind all the buzz is a growing mountain of practical use cases for ML in healthcare. Smart healthcare organizations are paying attention and looking at ways they can use cloud-based technologies to securely scale with increasing speed to market and cost optimization, all while maintaining a solid security and compliance posture. It’s great to see when buzzwords from previous years’ events have now turned into transformative change in healthcare

Here’s a quick 14-minute podcast I did on this subject, live with HealthcareNOW Radio’s Carol Flagg, recorded in the middle of all the action at HIMSS. Give it a listen here:

One of the takeaways I had from HIMSS was in seeing a significant increase of interest in containerization. And rightly so – containers can transform the way developers deploy and manage applications while maintaining the highest levels of security. Containers virtualize operating systems rather than hardware, enabling applications to run in isolated environments. And while containers have existed for years, having a fully managed way to deploy containers in the cloud specifically with the ability to transmit, store, or process PHI has been broadly adopted only recently. That’s where Kubernetes comes in.

ClearDATA announced its multi-cloud Kubernetes solution at HIMSS to an attentive audience eager to use it to have more rapid application development and iteration by making it easy to schedule, deploy, update, and manage applications and services. When integrated with a secure cloud environment, Kubernetes enables healthcare and life sciences developers to capitalize on the latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automate operations and open source flexibility to accelerate the time to market.

I recently published an article in Forbes about Kubernetes and what it means to healthcare in which I pointed out that Kubernetes solves one of the biggest challenges in healthcare IT: the time it takes to deploy a new application or expand an existing one. With Kubernetes, users can dynamically deploy new containers on demand, with a simple API call. These deployments incorporate an organization’s existing security and compliance rules around the implementation, removing the need to individually configure security and compliance post-deployment. Healthcare organizations simply spin up new container clusters and deploy their code, leveraging the platform to launch new applications in a fraction of the time. Organizations that have become the most effective with Kubernetes are tearing down and deploying new environments each time that they deploy updates to their healthcare application, driving down risk of vulnerabilities within a traditional environment.

With ClearDATA’s HITRUST-certified, HIPAA-compliant platform safeguarding sensitive data and critical applications, healthcare organizations can leverage Kubernetes to scale their healthcare IT infrastructure using a production-ready environment for containerized applications with these benefits:

• Adhering to requirements across different compliance frameworks (HIPAA, GDPR, GxP, etc.)
• Resolving vulnerability scanning requirements w/ automated TwistLock integration
• Visualizing your Kubernetes compliance status via the dashboard
• Automating logging and log backups

To learn how your organization can achieve greater security, faster application deployments, greater continuity and scalability at lower costs with compliant Kubernetes, visit our site at https://www.cleardata.com/solutions/multi-cloud-platform/kubernetes/