OREANDA-NEWS. Rackspace®(NYSE: RAX) today announced that National Kidney Registry (NKR), the largest paired kidney exchange program in the United States, is using Rackspace Managed Security and Compliance Assistance for its Rackspace Dedicated environment. With cloud managed security services and active defense from Rackspace, NKR operates its donor database with a high level of security that is crucial to protecting patient health information (PHI) and achieving Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) compliance standards.

Founded in 2007, NKR facilitates life-saving kidney transplants through a national kidney paired exchange program (KPD). This process aims to overcome donor-recipient incompatibility by swapping kidneys between multiple donor-recipient pairs to create a chain of donations. Since its inception, NKR has facilitated more than 1,850 kidney swaps in more than 400 donor chains.

The company originally stored depersonalized patient data to ensure that important patient health information was not compromised. However, NKR soon realized the need to build a more robust database that included basic patient information like personal contact details in order to increase the efficiency of its transplant system. It turned to Rackspace for expertise in security and compliance, as well as a dedicated environment that would provide optimal uptime and performance.

"High availability and security are mission critical to an organization like National Kidney Registry," said Joe Sinacore, director of education and development at NKR. "If our databases go down, it can derail the matching process and logistics of an entire chain donation, which can put multiple kidneys, and moreover, multiple lives on the line. Knowing that our Rackspace team is there to help maintain uptime as well as rapidly detect and respond to any security threats 24x7x365 is crucial."

Fanatical Support® from Rackspace allows NKR's development team of four to offload backend IT and security operations and focus on building out a robust matching system, which manages logistics for swaps including scheduling and communication with more than 80 transplant centers. The organization maintains a database of more than 120,000 data elements needed for matching 300 transplant recipients and paired donors at any given time.

Recently, NKR added several additional medical centers to its membership database of donors and paired recipients. According to NKR, Rackspace played a crucial role in gaining the trust and confidence of these centers, as the Rackspace Managed Security team was able to provide the level of security certifications, expertise and compliance necessary to satisfy requirements and ensure that customer data would be protected.

"Security is not just an IT issue, but rather it's a larger business issue affecting everything from user experience, revenue and, in the case of National Kidney Registry, critical patient information and company operations," said Brannon Lacey, general manager of Rackspace Managed Security. "Rackspace Managed Security in addition to a Rackspace Dedicated environment gives NKR access to world-class security expertise, threat detection and response, as well as a highly-available and scalable IT infrastructure that is crucial to maintaining uptime and meeting compliance requirements."

"With Rackspace Managed Security, Rackspace takes an active defense approach to security for our customers, minimizing time-to-detection with managed security services that allow for quicker detection and response. For an organization like NKR, which relies on seamless logistics and a robust database of patient information, this level of proactive security is critical," continued Lacey.

Rackspace Managed Security helps customers solve for their security and compliance challenges through 24x7x365 monitoring across complex, multi-cloud environments from the Rackspace Customer Security Operations Center, as well as manage Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) requirements through compliance assistance guidance.

 

About Rackspace
Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of 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 developed by AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenStack, VMware and others. The company serves customers in 120 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.