HIPAA compliance features
Preview
The ability for admins to add Enhanced Security and Compliance features is a feature in Public Preview. The compliance security profile and support for compliance standards are generally available (GA).
HIPAA compliance features requires enabling the compliance security profile, which adds monitoring agents, enforces instance types for inter-node encryption, provides a hardened compute image, and other features. For technical details, see Compliance security profile. It is your responsibility to confirm that each workspace has the compliance security profile enabled.
To use the compliance security profile, your Databricks account must include the Enhanced Security and Compliance add-on. For details, see the pricing page.
This feature requires your workspace to be on the Enterprise pricing tier.
Ensure that sensitive information is never entered in customer-defined input fields, such as workspace names, cluster names, and job names.
Which compute resources get enhanced security
The compliance security profile enhancements apply to compute resources in the classic compute plane in all regions.
Serverless SQL warehouse support for the compliance security profile varies by region. See Serverless SQL warehouses support the compliance security profile in some regions.
HIPAA overview
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH), and the regulations issued under HIPAA are a set of US healthcare laws. Among other provisions, these laws establish requirements for the use, disclosure, and safeguarding of protected health information (PHI).
HIPAA applies to covered entities and business associates that create, receive, maintain, transmit, or access PHI. When a covered entity or business associate engages the services of a cloud service provider (CSP), such as Databricks, the CSP becomes a business associate under HIPAA.
HIPAA regulations require that covered entities and their business associates enter into a contract called a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to ensure the business associates will protect PHI adequately. Among other things, a BAA establishes the permitted and required uses and disclosures of PHI by the business associate, based on the relationship between the parties and the activities and services being performed by the business associate.
Does Databricks permit the processing of PHI data on Databricks?
Yes, if you enable the compliance security profile and add the HIPAA compliance standard as part of the compliance security profile configuration. Contact your Databricks account team for more information. It is your responsibility before you process PHI data to have a BAA agreement with Databricks.
Enable HIPAA on a workspace
This section assumes you are on the E2 version of the Databricks platform.
If you are an existing HIPAA customer and your account is not yet on the E2 version of the Databricks platform,
Note that the E2 platform is a multi-tenant platform and your choice to deploy HIPAA on E2 will be treated as a waiver of any provision in your contract that would be in conflict with our ability to provide you HIPAA on the E2 platform.
To configure your workspace to support processing of data regulated by the HIPAA compliance standard, the workspace must have the compliance security profile enabled. You can enable it and add the HIPAA compliance standard across all workspaces or only on some workspaces.
To enable the compliance security profile and add the HIPAA compliance standard for an existing workspace, see Enable features on a workspace.
To set an account-level setting to enable the compliance security profile and HIPAA for new workspaces, see Set account-level defaults for new workspaces.
Important
You are wholly responsible for ensuring your own compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. Information provided in Databricks online documentation does not constitute legal advice, and you should consult your legal advisor for any questions regarding regulatory compliance.
Databricks does not support the use of preview features for the processing of PHI on the HIPAA on E2 platform, with the exception of the features listed in Preview features that are supported for processing of PHI data.
Preview features that are supported for processing of PHI data
The following preview features are supported for processing of PHI:
Legacy HIPAA support for cluster creation
If you are an existing HIPAA customer and your workspace is not on the E2 version of the Databricks platform, to create a cluster, see the legacy article Create and verify a cluster for legacy HIPAA support.