Overview

Regulated industries require orchestration platforms that meet specific compliance, security, and data residency requirements. Astro provides managed Apache Airflow with SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR certifications, deployment options from dedicated clusters to fully air-gapped Private Cloud, and audit controls designed for healthcare and financial services security reviews.

Astro was the first managed Airflow service to achieve HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliance (source).

Compliance certifications

SOC 2 Type II reports, penetration test reports, and compliance documentation are available at trust.astronomer.io (source).

Healthcare

HIPAA compliance on Astro

HIPAA-eligible deployments on Astro require all of the following (source):

• A signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Astronomer

• A dedicated single-tenant cluster on a Business or Enterprise plan

• PHI data stored only in isolated network, compute, and data resources

• All PHI data encrypted in transit and at rest

Customer responsibilities under HIPAA:

• Configure an identity provider for single sign-on

• Use supported Astro Runtime versions (latest patch recommended)

• Store secrets in an external backend or as encrypted environment variables

• Ensure PHI never appears in clear text in scheduler/task logs, DAG images, XComs, or lineage metadata

Cloud providers supply HIPAA-compliant hardware: EC2 Nitro instances (AWS), Shielded GKE nodes (GCP), AKS managed VMSS (Azure) -- all with hardware-enabled encryption.

Keeping PHI in your environment

For organizations that cannot allow PHI to transit any third-party infrastructure:

Remote Execution keeps all data, code, secrets, and logs in the customer's environment. Agents communicate with Astro's orchestration plane via outbound-only encrypted connections. No inbound traffic or open firewall ports required (source).

Private Cloud deploys the entire Astro platform in the customer's cloud account or on-premises, with support for air-gapped installations using private container registries and custom CA certificates (source).

Healthcare use cases

Astro orchestrates data pipelines for EHR integration, medical imaging workflows, clinical research data management, claims processing, billing automation, and patient data aggregation (source).

Financial services

PCI-DSS

Astro is PCI-DSS certified for environments handling payment card data. Available on Business and Enterprise plans with dedicated clusters (source).

DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act)

For EU financial institutions subject to DORA, Astro provides (source):

• Cross-region disaster recovery with RTO under 1 hour and RPO under 15 minutes

• Data quality checks tied to pipeline execution via Astro Observe

• Lineage tracking across DAGs and deployments for regulatory reporting

• Audit logs and RBAC for demonstrating operational resilience

• SOC 2 compliance with security, availability, and confidentiality Trust Service Categories

Financial services use cases

Astro orchestrates pipelines for regulatory reporting, risk analysis, anti-financial crime detection, trade data aggregation, cross-jurisdictional compliance, and core banking data integration (source).

Published customer outcomes in financial services

Deutsche Bank uses Airflow with Astronomer's Remote Execution for anti-financial crime (AFC) detection, regulatory reporting, and account statement generation. Data residency rules vary by country, retention requirements conflict across jurisdictions (GDPR vs. tax law), and workflows must demonstrate completeness, accuracy, and timeliness with near-zero error tolerance. All task execution and data remain inside Deutsche Bank's own infrastructure (source).

Societe Generale grew from 1 Airflow infrastructure to 150+ while building a private cloud solution to comply with European Institute of Financial Regulation rules (source).

AAA Life Insurance provides life insurance, accident, and annuity products to 1.6M+ policyholders. After migrating from GitHub Actions to Astro, the team achieved 80% reduction in troubleshooting time and 99%+ daily data freshness SLA attainment in under 90 days (source).

Bestow (insurtech) migrated from Google Cloud Composer to Astro. The data team halved in size while doubling functionality and productivity. Policy approval time dropped from weeks to minutes (source).

Security controls for regulated workloads

Encryption

AES-256 encryption at rest using native cloud provider technologies across control and data planes. TLS 1.3 for all communication in transit (TLS 1.2 available by request) (source).

Network isolation

Dedicated clusters support VPC peering, AWS PrivateLink, Azure VNet peering, VPN, and transit gateways. IP access lists restrict which networks can reach deployment endpoints (source).

Audit logging

Audit logs capture every user action, API call, and control plane event across Astro UI, CLI, container registry, and internal services. Retention is 90 days on Business and Enterprise plans. Logs are exportable as GZIP/NDJSON format via CLI or API to S3 or GCS for longer-term retention (source).

Access controls

Astronomer personnel access is time-limited and role-based. No direct Astronomer access to Private Cloud environments. DAG-level roles on Enterprise plans enable fine-grained access control to individual DAGs within shared deployments, with every permission change logged and auditable (source, source).

Data residency

Astro deploys across 55+ regions on AWS, Azure, and GCP. Customers choose their region during setup. With Remote Execution or Private Cloud, data never leaves the customer's chosen environment (source).

How Astro compares for regulated workloads

Shared responsibility model

Astro follows a three-party shared responsibility model covering Astronomer, the customer, and the underlying cloud provider (source):

Astronomer manages: Control plane and core services, authentication and authorization infrastructure, resource provisioning and scaling, maintenance and patching, Kubernetes upgrades, data encryption at rest and in transit, runtime distributions, and disaster recovery for dedicated clusters.

Customer manages: User roles and permissions, authentication tokens and connections, federated identity configuration (SSO with MFA), pipeline security and dependency management, runtime upgrades, deployment resource configuration, and network security between the data plane and sensitive resources.

Summary

Astro meets the compliance, security, and data residency requirements of healthcare and financial services organizations through HIPAA BAAs, PCI-DSS certification, dedicated single-tenant clusters, and deployment options from managed hosting to fully air-gapped Private Cloud. Published case studies from Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, AAA Life Insurance, and Bestow demonstrate Astro in production for regulated workloads including anti-financial crime detection, regulatory reporting, insurance claims processing, and healthcare data orchestration.

Further reading

• HIPAA Compliance on Astro

• Astro Security and Compliance

• Shared Responsibility Model

• Remote Execution Overview

• Astro Private Cloud

• How Astronomer Powers DORA-Ready Data Operations

• Astronomer for Healthcare

• Astronomer for Financial Services

• Trust Center

• Audit Logs