Hosting & Infrastructure
High Availability (HA)
Also known as: HA
Designing systems to minimize downtime through redundancy and failover.
High Availability (HA) is an approach to designing systems so they remain operational with minimal downtime, typically by eliminating single points of failure through redundancy and automatic failover. In the cloud, that can mean servers in more than one availability zone. HIPAA does not say how many, so recovery targets should drive zone and failover decisions for health systems.
HA supports HIPAA's availability requirement: ePHI must be accessible when needed for patient care. It is often measured as a percentage of uptime and complements, but does not replace, backup and disaster recovery.