As Big Data and analytics are take hold in nearly every industry, a whole new set of demands and problems face IT teams within organizations. This is especially true among healthcare companies, which are now struggling in masse to upgrade archaic infrastructure and technology and reduce costs both for the sake of their businesses and for their customers.

While moving to the cloud can help reduce costs and increase agility, given the sensitivity of health data, healthcare clouds need to be HIPAA-compliant — in other words, the security of health data and applications is paramount.

Companies like Box are rising to fill the gap, as the enterprise storage and collaboration giant has begun to serve healthcare providers, and recently secured HIPAA-compliance for its new platform. While newcomers like Box are bringing more attention to the problem, startups like ClearDATA are growing fast thanks to clouds built exclusively for the healthcare industry.

Now serving over 300,000 healthcare professionals and hosting data and apps (including tens of millions of health records) for a litany of healthcare providers, ClearData has raised $14 million in Series B funding as it looks to expand its platform and move into new geographies. Investors in the startup’s latest round include Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Excel Venture Management and Norwest Venture Partners.

The round includes the $7 million ClearDATA announced in August, explaining that it decided to hold a second closing of its Series B round to allow the participation of its newest strategic investor, Merck Global.

As Alex explained at the time, ClearDATA’s appeal lies in its healthcare-centric approach to data, offering healthcare customers an end-to-end service designed to make it easy to move their apps and data to the cloud, while accessing that data over a private Internet connection. It also uses a data storage model that makes it easy for companies to locate its data to allow the kind of auditing required by healthcare privacy requirements and HIPAA.

In this sense, ClearDATA differs from AWS, Azure or Rackspace in that its storage equipment is custom-designed for health data and images. This allows the company to compete with the massive footprints of cloud providers like Amazon, for example, which offers a more general-purpose cloud and a growing set of storage services and analytics tools.

Today, the healthcare information technology market is growing at a breakneck speed thanks to the demands of thousands of healthcare providers looking to go digital, transfer health records to the cloud and maintain huge amounts of critical (and sensitive) data.

These companies often lack the resources and capacity to design, deploy and manage their applications, and they’re looking for rentable, on-demand infrastructure as a result. Plus, none of the commercial clouds can meet the particular requirements of healthcare’s migration to the cloud line-for-line, so that’s where ClearDATA wants to help.

By customizing its cloud to meet these unique demands, it now works with customers that range from small organizations and practices to hospitals and large clinics, and extending to client-server and SaaS-based healthcare software providers.

For more, find ClearDATA at home here.

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