This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I work in health insurance. We are rolling out AI. It’s in the cloud so all your data is literally stored on Amazon servers. Was told it’s secure because we have a private tenant. No I hate this shit.
Same here. I feel like I’m taking fucking crazy pills.
Why? Why are all our financials on OneDrive? Why is our system setup being done with a Entra-federated third party tool? Why does CoPilot have access to my email with possible HIPAA-privileged data in it? Why do we have to shut off our servers on the weekend if it saves so much money and doesn’t cost anything when idle?
I can’t believe these morons gave away personal computing because they just didn’t want to deal with having on-site hardware, and it doesn’t even save any money.
Capital expense vs operating expense. Same reason you might lease a car instead of buying.
This isn't surprising to me in the slightest. I've been part of a small team tasked with assessing products and services for larger enterprises before and they'd almost always look over our findings nod a bunch and then go with the company whose rep took them out to a fancy dinner or gave them kickbacks.
The conflict of interest angle here is wild. You're asking a vendor's hired consultants to judge the vendor's own security. That's not a bug in FedRAMP, it's the entire architecture.
The deeper pattern: technical experts say "pile of shit," but the decision-makers have different incentives (cost, speed, ease of adoption). Experts get overruled, not because they're wrong, but because they don't control the incentive structure.
This happens everywhere. Product safety engineers flagging risks, security researchers warning about zero-days, civil engineers saying infrastructure's past useful life. The signals exist. The system just doesn't care.
Are you a bot?
CLOUD is such a fucking rip off!! Anyone with any sense can see that.
My favorite part of Amazon’s Web Service is AWS Outposts.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
They will put the AWS cloud in your data center.
You will rent AWS servers and the rack they sit in. You will administer them, power and cool them, handle all the connectivity to the servers and you get to run all the software..
It is such a fucking rip off.
I found out that Azure DevOps can be hosted in this same manner. You pay a license fee to host and maintain it yourself.
I was shocked. Lmao.
This is because DevOps is the updated version of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. You have always been able to self host it because that used to be the only option.
I only found out because a colleague spent an entire day maintaining the server we host it on. The notion of having to pay to do all the BS operative work around using that shitty platform is so silly to me. If anything it feels like Microsoft should pay us.
I see the approach of Outposts, just don’t know if I agree with it. Part of the point is it lets you have a dedicated, isolated, on-premise platform without the need to train existing engineers/admins on a secondary technology like Nutanix, ProxMox, etc.
So your calculus should include the cost to rent vs dedicated head count (and let me tell you, companies fucking hate headcount).
Now all that being said, I have yet to see a situation where it really is more cost effective, especially due to the things you mentioned.
on-premise
You mean "private cloud", right? No one who can afford outpost will be putting this in their server closet. It'll go in the datacenter.
The whole point of “cloud” was to eliminate data centers.
If there was a low latency need for a private cloud, of course you put it as close as possible.
“Private cloud” has always been a synonym for “on-premise”. I’ve managed Datacenter infrastructure for decades and always referred to it to on-premise before private cloud even became a term. It basically is referring to Datacenter space you own or rent vs another company’s servers and DCs.
Hell, I’ve worked in companies where they had Datacenter space in the same building as their office (and not small either, one was 32 racks, another was almost 200). So that very much was “on-premise”
They do that because there are some things that you can’t put in the cloud, like HIPAA protected data. It’s absolutely a rip off, but that was their solution.
You absolutely can store HIPAA data in the cloud.
Latency is one of the big selling points for Outposts. They have customers wanting to control industrial equipment from their cloud resources, but the nearest AWS region is too far away to provide the low latency connectivity they need. With Outposts, they get the cloud, but with on-prem network latency.
There is no certification process in place for using a cloud to store HIPAA data. It even says that on the page that you linked. Legally, any organization that used this service would be opening themselves to further liability under HIPAA.
can you site the part of HIPAA that says that?
There's no certification for HIPAA defined in law.
No I can’t cite something that doesn’t exist. I literally just said there isn’t one… so I am not sure what your point is.
Legally, any organization that used this service would be opening themselves to further liability under HIPAA.
What legal violation? Because the law says nothing about that.
what the law does allow, is data storage with a BAA.
What?!? The entire purpose of HIPAA is to put liability on misuse of data. At this point, I have no fucking clue what your point is.
Yes, but you talked about how cloud storage vs on prem is a violation.
Put up or shut up.
Also see my edit about a BAA
The answer to your question is in the article you posted… did you even read it?
Have a great day, I’m done talking in circles.
I'm not op, and I've Read the actual law.
Believe it or not I pay attention to usernames. I was talking about the link you just posted that mentions the liability assumed by the signers of the BAA.
Maybe read it again? My job requires me to be HIPAA and FERPA certified, I am confident in my interpretation of the situation.
I'm also required to be compliant.
But how can companies like google have products like
https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa
if cloud storage is a violation?
Seriously, stop being a troll. I’m done with this conversation. Not one time have I used the word violation.
Fun fact, the law actually does not lay out a single technical "must do".
But rather establish liabilities and defines miss use. Which is NOT the same as proper use.
Tell that to literally every hospital, medical provider, and insurer in the United States.
They’re all using AWS, and OneDrive.
That's news to me. Every time to vendor tries to get me to switch to their cloud product I tell them to get lost. I'm not willingly handing over patient data to these clowns, I've seen how bad they are at security.
I am a software developer who does custom EMR software specifically because the places I work for can’t use the cloud. But okay I will try…
