Clients:

• The digital wellness and weight-loss platform of the largest health insurer in the US

• A nationwide association of 30+ health insurance plans

• A Fortune Global 500 insurance and financial services company

Role: Forward Deployed Engineering / Certified Solution Architect

Tech Stacks: AWS, Azure, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD

The Challenge

Healthcare and insurance providers desire to accelerate public cloud adoption while adhering to strict regulatory frameworks. They seek scalable, automated, multi-account cloud environments that can pass HITRUST and HIPAA compliance audits.

The Solution

I architected and delivered secure, multi-cloud landing zones on AWS and Azure using a "Compliance-as-Code" methodology. I leveraged AWS Organizations and Azure Management Groups to establish a governance hierarchy where best-practices and controls are inherited automatically by all child AWS accounts and Azure subscriptions.

To ensure HIPAA and HITRUST compliance, I engineered the environment to automatically enforce controls including:

Zero Trust Identity & Access Management

• Least Privilege Access: Implemented granular RBAC using AWS IAM Identity Center and Azure Entra ID (AKA Azure AD), restricting access strictly to business needs.

• MFA Enforcement: Enforced MFA policies for cloud console and CLI access.

• Just-in-Time  Access: Implemented privileged identity management solutions that grant temporary elevated access when approved by workflow.

Data Encryption & Security

• Encryption at Rest: Enforced mandatory server-side encryption for data stores including S3, EBS, RDS, Azure SQL and Azure Storage using AWS KMS and Azure Key Vault with enforced key rotation.

• Encryption in Transit: Configured load balancers, WAFs and API gateways to reject non-TLS traffic, enforcing TLS 1.2+ with strong cipher suites to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

• Secrets Management: Eliminated hard-coded credentials within app code, replaced with calls to AWS Secrets Manager and Azure Key Vault.

• Data Loss Prevention to detect and remediate publicly accessible or unencrypted block storage

Network Isolation & Boundary Protection

• Private Connectivity: Removed public internet access for private subnets that hold  backend databases and internal services using AWS PrivateLink and Azure Private Endpoints, ensuring traffic doesn’t needlessly traverse the public internet.

• Traffic Inspection: Implemented centralized ingress & egress filtering via AWS Network Firewall and Azure Firewall to inspect traffic for malicious patterns.

Auditing, Logging & Monitoring

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Delivered 100% of the infrastructure via terraform, CloudFormation, and ARM templates integrated into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring compliant, version-controlled environments.

• Immutable Logging: Aggregated audit logs (CloudTrail, Azure Activity Logs) into a centralized "Log Archive" account. I configured S3 Object Lock to satisfy HIPAA's non-repudiation requirements.

• Retention Policies: Configured automated block storage lifecycle policies to retain audit logs for the minimum durations required by the compliance frameworks.

• Continuous Compliance: Configured AWS Config and Azure Policy to detect and automatically remediate configuration drift.

Vulnerability Management

• Automated Scanning: Configured Amazon Inspector and Microsoft Cloud Defender to continuously scan compute resources for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs).

• Hardened Images: Built automated image generation pipelines to construct hardened operating systems that match industry Benchmarks before use on VMs.

Resiliency & Cost

• Resiliency: Achieved target RTO/RPO using cost-efficient Warm Standby and Pilot Light methodologies, supported by cross-region, immutable backups via AWS Backup and Azure Backup.

• Cost Optimization: Implemented FinOps strategies utilizing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to reduce cloud spend by 20-30%.