Amazon Web Services (AWS) review
A broad AWS infrastructure foundation for healthcare workloads, with customer-managed configuration.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud infrastructure and managed services for organizations building, hosting, storing, and processing applications and data. Its healthcare offering is aimed at startups, enterprises, public-sector organizations, nonprofits, and individual developers that need compute, storage, databases, networking, and application services for HIPAA-eligible workloads. AWS is available through the web and API, supporting workload placement across multiple Regions and Availability Zones.
AWS uses a pay-as-you-go plan: customers pay for the individual services they use, with no long-term contracts required, and service-specific pricing applies. The overall cost depends on the selected services, Regions, usage, storage, data transfer, backups, and support plan. This model gives organizations room to assemble an environment around their workload, but it requires planning across the AWS services involved rather than budgeting for one fixed hosting package.
For HIPAA-oriented deployments, AWS provides a standard Business Associate Addendum managed through AWS Artifact, along with encryption, granular identity and access management, network isolation, audit logging, API activity tracking through CloudTrail, and centralized backup scheduling, retention management, monitoring, and compliance reporting. Dedicated physical hosts and dedicated instances are available, while 24/7 support coverage is listed for the category. AWS fits organizations that need broad infrastructure choices and can manage configuration responsibilities. It is less suitable for teams seeking a narrowly defined hosting package with a single, predetermined setup, because HIPAA eligibility is limited to designated services and customers remain responsible for selecting and configuring appropriate components.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) pros and cons
- Where it wins
- HIPAA-eligible services with a standard Business Associate Addendum
- Encryption, granular IAM, CloudTrail auditing, and backup controls
- Multi-Region deployment with dedicated hosts and instances
- Where it doesn't
- HIPAA eligibility applies only to designated AWS services
- Customers must configure workloads under the shared-responsibility model
- Costs vary by services, regions, usage, storage, and data transfer
Amazon Web Services (AWS) fact sheet, pricing and score →
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