Secure Cloud Hosting for Compliance: A Practical Guide for Startups and Regulated Industries
Blog post from Railway
The guide discusses how compliance requirements influence infrastructure decisions for teams operating in healthcare, finance, and SaaS sectors, specifically when considering managed cloud platforms versus self-managed infrastructure. It highlights the importance of understanding regulatory frameworks, shared responsibility models, and retaining control over certain processes regardless of where workloads run. Key topics covered include achieving SOC 2 compliance for startups without self-managing servers, GDPR compliance through incident response and breach notifications, EU data residency requirements, encryption practices, automating vulnerability scans, and maintaining tamper-proof audit logs. It also addresses the necessity of dedicated tenancy for ISO 27001, PCI-DSS compliance on serverless infrastructure, handling HIPAA compliance for containerized apps, and best practices for role-based access control on serverless stacks. The guide emphasizes the importance of evaluating cloud hosts' capabilities, such as audit logs, team permissions, encryption standards, and the ability to configure and evidence controls. It also discusses specific questions to ask hosting providers and outlines the compliance offerings of Railway, a cloud hosting platform, which supports various regulatory frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR, and provides detailed security measures and hosting options.