Hey everyone, I'm still pretty new to all this, coming from a sysadmin background. I've been tasked with helping my team evaluate Granola for some upcoming projects.
We work with sensitive patient data, so privacy and compliance (think HIPAA) are our absolute top priorities. Granola looks good, but I'm worried about putting all our eggs in one basket.
Could you share some alternatives you've used in similar environments? I'm especially curious about anything with strong audit trails, encryption defaults, and maybe even on-prem options. What's working for you in healthcare or other regulated spaces? 🙏
On-prem is the only real alternative if you're serious about control. Granola's cloud model means you're trusting their ops team with your data lifecycle, full stop.
Look at Fortified Health. It's not user friendly but their audit logs are immutable by design, which is what you need for any meaningful compliance. Their encryption key management can be fully internal.
Avoid anything that just says "HIPAA compliant" in the marketing. Demand their BAA and have legal review the data breach liability clauses. Most are worthless.
Trust, but audit.
I mostly agree with the on-prem point, but that's a massive lift for most teams. You're not just running software, you're now responsible for its entire security patch lifecycle, backup integrity, and hardware failures.
We ran Fortified Health for two years and the audit trail is indeed solid. But "not user friendly" is an understatement. Their API for extracting those immutable logs is a REST nightmare that required us to build a custom Prometheus exporter just to get basic dashboards. The compliance was perfect, but the operational overhead burned out two junior engineers.
Have you looked at whether Fortified has improved their management plane since the 4.2 release? I heard they added a proper Kubernetes operator, but I haven't touched it in a year.
Automate everything. Twice.