Building the cloud backbone of modern healthcare

Photo courtesy of Anjan Kumar Gundaboina.

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Healthcare no longer ends at the hospital walls. It resides in the cloud, within encrypted channels that connect patients to physicians, laboratories, and insurers. Few understand the invisible framework better than Anjan Kumar Gundaboina, Senior Cloud Security and DevSecOps Architect at Optum, who has built the digital backbone that allows telemedicine, record sharing, and patient platforms to operate securely at a massive scale.

“Every connection carries a life behind it,” he said. “When technology becomes the bridge between patients and care, trust has to be built into every layer.”

Securing the digital shift

The surge in virtual healthcare from telemedicine to digital records brought new urgency to secure design. At Optum, Gundaboina led the construction of cloud-native environments built on Kubernetes clusters across AKS, EKS, and GKE, ensuring that security scaled automatically as demand grew.

The number of telehealth visits skyrocketed overnight during the pandemic. Gundaboina developed a multi-cloud Kubernetes environment, knit together through Istio service mesh to ensure encryption on each service-to-service interaction. Privacy was fully kept, even as traffic volumes surged. With security-as-code, every deployment receives the same regulatory protections automatically, eliminating the risk of manual reviews and missed configurations.

His framework allowed clinicians to scale digital consultations safely, protecting personal health data while maintaining continuous uptime. These same environments handled electronic prescriptions, patient images, and insurance exchanges without downtime or data leakage.

Bridging systems, preserving trust

True modernization meant more than video calls. It required different healthcare systems to share data without breaking compliance. Gundaboina engineered secure FHIR API gateways that connect Epic EHRs to cloud-based patient portals, allowing individuals to view their lab results or prescriptions from anywhere while maintaining full HIPAA and HITRUST compliance.

“Interoperability used to mean vulnerability,” he said. “The goal was to make access universal without making exposure inevitable.”

These implementations successfully passed formal audits, demonstrating that regulatory compliance can coexist with accessibility. By embedding encryption, authentication, and token validation within every microservice, he ensured that data movement was both traceable and private. His design transformed patient engagement into a measurable, secure, auditable, and dependable process at scale.

Engineering agility with discipline

Sustainability became the next frontier. Gundaboina knew that healthcare systems continued to expand, with the addition of new clinics, data sources, and devices. To match that pace, he standardized deployment pipelines with Terraform and CI/CD automation through GitHub Actions, reducing environment setup from weeks to hours.

Every new service deployed had its own set of pre-defined security baselines, which eliminated the chance for drift between development and production. This allowed Optum’s engineering teams to deliver updates fast without any impact on compliance. The process transformed how infrastructure teams operated, and security became an intrinsic property, rather than an external checklist.

These results formed the basis of his IEEE presentation and publications, demonstrating how automation turns regulation into routine. Gundaboina argued that digital transformation in healthcare fails when security is an afterthought. His research proved that guardrails must precede growth, not follow it.

Scaling security with care

Behind every automation script and encrypted packet lies a human consequence. Gundaboina’s designs were built on that awareness. He viewed digital transformation as an extension of patient safety, no different from the use of sterile instruments or accurate dosing.

At Optum, his role grew from technical architect to strategist, aligning security engineering with clinical reliability. Each project struck a balance between resilience and accessibility: telehealth sessions remained confidential, EHR integrations remained compliant, and clinicians accessed data without delay.

“Security is part of care delivery,” he said. “If patients can’t trust their data, they can’t trust their care.”

Through his leadership, Optum’s digital systems achieved a new equilibrium: agility without risk, speed without exposure. His frameworks became case studies in journals and conferences, cited as proof that healthcare’s future depends on cloud architectures where protection and performance rise together.