AWS HIPAA Dedicated Hardware

TL;DR

To meet AWS HIPAA requirements for hardware dedicated to a single customer, you’ll need to use services like Dedicated Hosts or Outposts. This guide explains how to choose and set up these options, ensuring your workloads run on isolated infrastructure.

1. Understanding the Requirement

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) often necessitates single-tenant hardware for sensitive healthcare data. AWS provides several ways to achieve this isolation:

• Dedicated Hosts: Physical servers dedicated to your AWS account. You have control over instance placement.
• Outposts: AWS infrastructure and services brought on-premises, offering a fully managed single-tenant environment.

Choosing between them depends on your needs for control, latency, and existing infrastructure.

2. Choosing the Right Service

1. Dedicated Hosts: Ideal if you need to use specific hardware features or have licensing requirements tied to physical servers. Good for migrating existing workloads with strict compatibility constraints.
2. Outposts: Best when low latency is critical, and you want a consistent AWS experience on-premises. Suitable for applications that require local data processing.

3. Setting up Dedicated Hosts

1. Request Hosts: In the EC2 console, go to ‘Dedicated Hosts’ and request hosts based on your instance type requirements. Specify the quantity and availability zone.
2. Verify Host Availability: Once requested, AWS will provision the hosts. Check their status in the console.
3. Launch Instances onto Dedicated Hosts: When launching an EC2 instance, select ‘Dedicated Hosts’ under ‘Tenancy’. Choose a host from your available pool.

Example of specifying tenancy during launch:

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --instance-type t3.medium --tenancy dedicated

4. Setting up AWS Outposts

1. Order Outposts: Through the AWS console or your account team, order an Outpost rack based on your capacity needs.
2. Install and Configure: AWS will deliver the rack to your data center. Follow their installation guide for physical setup and network configuration.
3. Connect to AWS Region: Establish a secure connection between your Outpost and your chosen AWS region.
4. Deploy Workloads: Deploy EC2 instances, databases, and other services onto the Outpost as you would in the cloud.

Note: Outposts require significant planning and coordination with AWS.

5. Verifying Single-Tenant Isolation

1. Dedicated Hosts: Use EC2 Instance Metadata to confirm your instance is running on a dedicated host.
2. Outposts: Monitor resource utilization within the Outpost console to ensure resources are isolated to your rack.

Example of checking tenancy using metadata:

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-tenancy

6. Security Considerations

• Network Segmentation: Implement robust network segmentation to isolate HIPAA workloads from other environments.
• Access Control: Use IAM roles and policies to restrict access to sensitive data and resources.
• Encryption: Encrypt data at rest and in transit using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
• Regular Audits: Conduct regular security audits to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations.

7. cyber security Best Practices

Ensure your dedicated hardware is protected by following general cyber security principles:

• Keep software patched and up-to-date.
• Implement intrusion detection and prevention systems.
• Monitor logs for suspicious activity.
• Regularly back up your data.