Managing and securing disparate pieces of container architecture is a difficult undertaking for healthcare organizations.
With Kubernetes, healthcare organizations have the opportunity to overcome the challenges presented by HIPAA and automate application deployment, scaling, and management, while being cognizant of even greater cyber-risk exposure. However, this open source system can also come with significant barriers to entry. Many entities aren’t sure where to even begin with setting up the solution, and countless others lack the in-house resources necessary to utilize Kubernetes.
For healthcare organizations seeking to evaluate or adopt Kubernetes, often the most challenging part is knowing where to begin and how to secure it. Intricacies such as: creating your first cluster, node groups and roles need to be defined and carefully thought through. Working with an experienced resource to help develop templates can help organization clear this initial hurdle. When evaluating or developing a template with some basic parameters include—VPC, subnets, your instance types, the type of node group you’re going to use, the number of nodes, manifest file locations—you could execute a CloudFormation template through scripting, through automation, passing the parameters, and away you go.
A Kubernetes cluster is only as good as the solution that’s deployed to it. Sometimes figuring out how to get that solution out there can be tricky, and that’s creating manifest files or just executing the proper commands. Then there’s the challenge of keeping it up-to-date and moving things through to do that iteration. Start scaling HIPAA workloads faster. Ultimately, Kubernetes allows healthcare IT to develop and deploy more complex applications that are more reliable, more secure, and easier to deploy and maintain. It gives healthcare IT the peace-of-mind to combine scale computing with maximum security to remain in compliance.