Chapel Hill’s healthcare economy — from UNC Health affiliates to independent practices in the Eastowne Medical Park to behavioral health providers along Franklin Street — operates under stringent HIPAA requirements. A breach of protected health information triggers mandatory notification to affected individuals, HHS, and potentially the media, along with potential penalties of up to $2.1 million per violation category per year.

We implement comprehensive HIPAA compliance programs that cover all three safeguard categories: administrative (risk assessments, policies, workforce training, incident response), physical (facility access controls, workstation security, device disposal), and technical (access controls, audit logging, encryption, transmission security). Our programs include business associate agreement management, breach notification procedures, and documentation that satisfies OCR auditors.

For Chapel Hill practices using electronic health record systems like Epic, Cerner, or athenahealth, we ensure the underlying infrastructure — servers, networks, endpoints, backups, and cloud environments — meets every HIPAA technical safeguard requirement.

Healthcare and research organizations cannot afford to staff a 24/7 security operations center internally. Our Managed Security Services provide continuous monitoring, detection, and response through a dedicated SOC staffed by credentialed analysts who understand Chapel Hill’s regulated environments.

We deploy Extended Detection and Response across endpoints, network infrastructure, cloud workloads, email, and identity platforms. Every alert is triaged by human analysts who understand the difference between a researcher accessing data from a home network and an attacker exfiltrating research files. Genuine threats are contained immediately with minimal operational disruption to clinical or research workflows.

Included: 24/7/365 monitoring, XDR deployment, human-led triage, real-time containment, monthly security reports, and quarterly executive briefings.

Organizations that handle student education records — tutoring services, educational technology companies, university-affiliated research groups, and contracted service providers — must comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. FERPA violations can result in loss of federal funding eligibility, a consequence that reverberates through Chapel Hill’s education-dependent economy.

For research organizations handling federally funded data, we implement security controls aligned with NIST 800-171 and NIST Cybersecurity Framework as required by NIH, NSF, DOD, and DOE grant agreements. This includes access controls, encryption, audit logging, incident response, and continuous monitoring that satisfy sponsor requirements and protect research integrity.

We build unified compliance frameworks that address FERPA, HIPAA, and NIST requirements simultaneously for Chapel Hill organizations that operate across multiple regulated domains — reducing duplicate controls and audit fatigue.

Chapel Hill organizations face threats from sophisticated actors — including nation-state groups targeting university research, criminal ransomware gangs targeting healthcare, and opportunistic attackers exploiting the open network environments that academic institutions tend to maintain. Our penetration testing services simulate these real-world attacks to identify vulnerabilities before adversaries exploit them.

We test external and internal networks, web applications, cloud configurations, wireless infrastructure, and social engineering susceptibility. For healthcare organizations, we focus on medical device network segmentation, EHR system access controls, and the patient portal attack surface. For research entities, we assess lab network isolation, data repository security, and credential management practices. Every engagement produces executive and technical reports with prioritized remediation guidance.

When a Chapel Hill healthcare practice discovers ransomware on its EHR server at 6 a.m. or a research lab detects unauthorized access to a grant-funded database, the response in the first hours determines whether the incident is contained or escalates into a catastrophe. Craig Petronella is a licensed digital forensic examiner who leads investigations with evidence-collection methodology that meets legal and regulatory standards.

Our incident response follows NIST 800-61 methodology: preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident review. For HIPAA-covered entities, we assist with breach determination, notification obligations, and OCR reporting. For research organizations, we help assess whether research data integrity has been compromised and coordinate with university compliance offices and grant sponsors as needed.

Chapel Hill organizations increasingly use cloud platforms for EHR hosting, research data storage, collaboration, and analytics. We assess and harden cloud environments in Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud with a focus on HIPAA-compliant configurations, encryption, access controls, and audit logging.

For research groups using cloud-based data lakes or high-performance computing clusters, we ensure data residency, encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege access policies, and logging satisfy both HIPAA and research sponsor requirements. We also implement backup and disaster recovery for cloud-resident data so a misconfiguration or ransomware event does not destroy irreplaceable research records.