ViaWest launched cloud infrastructure services tailored for the healthcare industry Wednesday. The audit-ready “Compliance-as-a-Service” offering comes with built-in compliance elements specific to the heavily regulated sector's requirements.

The US data center services provider has built the infrastructure for these services that addresses security and privacy requirements. ViaWest's health cloud uses virtualization and security solutions by a company called Abnology, which enables it to provide partitioned cloud environments to customers to optimize data protection.

The company's CTO Jason Carolan said, “The healthcare environment has become much more complex," confirms Jason Carolan, Chief Technology Officer at ViaWest. “In an effort to relieve the pressure for companies facing potential fines and compliance breaches, ViaWest can now immediately help companies to determine their organization's risk, enforce further data privacy actions and establish security enforcement strategies that will help them meet their compliance goals.”

ViaWest cited a Ponemon Institute study that found that 94% of healthcare organizations surveyed have had at least one data breach in the past two years with a price tag between US$10,000 and more than $1m. Without physical security, secure infrastructure, power and HVAC redundancies and advanced IT engineering expertise, companies run the risk of non-compliance, the data center provider said.