Rackspace Increases Focus on Healthcare with HITRU

SAN ANTONIO, TX --(Marketwired - March 01, 2017) - Rackspace ^® today announced that it has earned Certified status for information security by the Health Information Trust (HITRUST) Alliance for its dedicated environment. With the HITRUST CSF Certified status, the Rackspace Dedicated environment now meets key healthcare regulations and requirements for protecting and securing sensitive private healthcare information (PHI).

HITRUST CSF Certified status indicates that the Rackspace Dedicated environment has met industry-defined requirements and is appropriately managing risk, and places Rackspace in an elite group of organizations worldwide that have earned this certification. By including federal and state regulations, standards and frameworks, and incorporating a risk-based approach, the HITRUST CSF helps organizations address these challenges through a comprehensive and flexible framework of prescriptive and scalable security controls.

"The HITRUST CSF has become the information protection framework for the healthcare industry, and the CSF Assurance program is bringing a new level of effectiveness and efficiency to third-party assurance," said Ken Vander Wal, chief compliance officer, HITRUST. "The CSF Certification is now the benchmark that organizations require to safeguard PHI are measured against with regards to information protection. We are pleased that Rackspace has taken the steps necessary to achieve HITRUST CSF Certified status, and we expect this designation to provide more confidence to its customers."

HITRUST CSF Certified status applies to the practices, procedures and policies that govern offerings within the Rackspace Dedicated environment including Rackspace Dedicated Servers, storage, databases, networking solutions and managed virtualization. Leveraging the Rackspace Dedicated environment helps healthcare organizations mitigate the security risk of electronic protected health information (ePHI) and ensure their data is hosted in an IT environment that complies with key controls from several industry standards.

"Medical data is becoming an increasingly attractive target for cyber criminals, so healthcare companies like Central Logic must keep security and compliance top of mind to protect our business and our customers," said David Meservy, director of IT and security at Central Logic , a healthcare solutions company and Rackspace customer. "HIPAA compliance alone is no longer enough for healthcare organizations, and we now look to frameworks like HITRUST for stringent, ongoing benchmarks that organizations can follow. By achieving HITRUST CSF Certification, Rackspace has offloaded the complexity of achieving these certifications on our own. This is a true differentiator and a sign of the company's emphasis on security and support for customers."

With the HITRUST CSF Certified status, the Rackspace Dedicated environment helps healthcare customers reduce the cost and complexity of creating a secure IT infrastructure that meets a multitude of regulations and standards, as well as alleviate audit fatigue from scrutiny of regulators, auditors and third parties. Additionally, customers leveraging the HITRUST CSF Certified Rackspace Dedicated environment gain 24x7x365 access to experts, and can benefit from 100 percent network availability SLAs, infrastructure architecture design and management, all backed by Fanatical Support ^® .

"Rackspace has served the needs of more than 2,000 healthcare customers for years, and we're now investing more heavily in this industry with the HITRUST CSF Certification on our dedicated solutions," said Mark Roenigk, chief transformation officer at Rackspace. "The HITRUST CSF is the most widely adopted security framework in the healthcare industry, and an IT infrastructure requirement for most healthcare organizations, including health insurance companies, hospitals, medical practices and SaaS providers. As the healthcare industry is further pressured to digitize data and operations, Rackspace is well positioned to help these organizations meet stringent technical regulations."

The Rackspace Dedicated environment now meets HITRUST CSF Certified status in all regions for new and existing customers. For more information about how Rackspace can help customers manage HITRUST compliant workloads, visit www.rackspace.com/healthcare or see the blog post at https://blog.rackspace.com/medical-data-secur...-rackspace .

About Rackspace Rackspace, the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of hosting and cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise, easy-to-use tools, and Fanatical Support® for leading technologies including AWS, VMware, Microsoft, OpenStack and others. The company serves customers in 150 countries, including more than half of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, and has been honored by Fortune, Forbes, and others as one of the best companies to work for. Learn more at www.rackspace.com .