We've been seeing more vendors, customers, and prospects asking about HIPAA compliant services. Since Paubox is a Business Associate to thousands of customers, we’ve been wondering if they are able to use Cloudflare in a HIPAA compliant manner.
We know the HIPAA industry is vast, so we can empathize with just how many people need to use cloud services in this sector. Today we will determine if Cloudflare offers HIPAA compliant service or not.
Cloudflare is a web infrastructure security company that provides content delivery network services (CDN). They also specialize in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation, internet security, and distributed Domain Name Server (DNS) services. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.
A Business Associate is a person or company that performs certain functions or activities that involve the use or disclosure of protected health information (PHI) for a Covered Entity. In a nutshell, the role of a Business Associate is to help Covered Entities comply with the HIPAA Privacy Rule
Read full article: What does it mean to be a Business Associate?
If a Business Associate provides services to a Covered Entity, then a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) must be in place. A BAA is a written contract between a Covered Entity and a Business Associate and is required by law for HIPAA compliance. At a minimum, a Business Associate Agreement contains 10 provisions.
Read full article: Business Associate Agreement Provisions
We checked the Cloudflare site for mention of their ability to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). However, we were not able to find any relevant information on their site regarding their ability to sign a BAA. For example, while the Cloudflare Compliance page mentioned PCI DSS, SOC 2, and SOC 3 reports, there was no mention of their stance on HIPAA compliance. In addition, their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages also turned up no relevant results.
Conclusion: Cloudflare makes no mention of their ability to sign a BAA. We therefore conclude they should not be used as a HIPAA compliant cloud service.