What is HIPAA?
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
US federal law that mandates security and privacy protections for protected health information (PHI), with specific technical safeguards that SASE platforms can enforce.
HIPAA's Security Rule requires three categories of safeguards: administrative, physical, and technical. SASE platforms directly address the technical safeguards. Access controls (ZTNA with per-app policies and MFA), audit controls (comprehensive logging across all inspection points), integrity controls (DLP preventing unauthorized PHI modification or exfiltration), and transmission security (TLS inspection ensuring encrypted channels for PHI in transit).
The most common HIPAA gap that SASE closes is unauthorized access to ePHI systems. Legacy VPN access grants network-level connectivity to all healthcare applications. ZTNA limits access to specific applications based on user identity, device posture, and contextual risk — a physician's EMR access doesn't grant access to billing systems, and a billing clerk's access doesn't reach clinical databases.
For MSPs serving healthcare clients, SASE simplifies HIPAA compliance delivery. A properly configured SASE tenant with ZTNA policies, DLP rules for PHI patterns (SSN, MRN, ICD codes), and comprehensive audit logging covers the majority of HIPAA's technical safeguard requirements. The BAA (Business Associate Agreement) is the MSP's responsibility — ensure your SASE vendor will sign a BAA as a subcontractor.
A set of technologies that detect and prevent unauthorized transmission of sensitive data by inspecting content at rest, in motion, and in use against predefined and custom data patterns.
An access model that grants users connectivity to specific applications, not networks, based on identity and device posture, verified continuously per session.
Insurance policies that cover financial losses from cyber incidents, increasingly requiring specific security controls like ZTNA, MFA, and endpoint detection as prerequisites for coverage.
A cloud-delivered architecture that converges SD-WAN and security services (SWG, CASB, ZTNA, FWaaS) into a single, globally distributed platform.
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