Security Challenges and Solutions Using Healthcare Cloud Computing

Introduction

The healthcare industry is a crucial one for any country. The development of information and communication technology over the past several years has had a significant impact on the healthcare sector. In order to offer people with individualised and preventative healthcare and to increase system and operational efficiency, it is supporting the convergent healthcare systems that will enable healthcare stakeholders to organise their operations effortlessly. In fact, with new urban development ideas like smart towns, a coordinated healthcare strategy may manage health for the entire population at local, national, or international levels (Lo’Ai & Habeeb, 2018). Cloud based health care has a bright future, and as it converges with other technologies like wireless networks, sensor technologies, and mobile computing, more types of cloud services may be developed and offered (Ekonomou, Fan, Buchanan, & Thuemmler, 2011). The idea of cloud-based health care depends on resource sharing through a network to enhance resource availability and lower costs (Kaur & Chana, 2014).

As a result of its on-demand service, high scalability, and virtualization features, cloud computing technologies is ideally suited for the medical industry. At present, a lot of articles have covered the intersection of cloud based medical care, which some papers refer to as “e-health cloud(s)” (Yao et al., 2014). It is referred to as “cloud healthcare” in this research. Although cloud healthcare is technically a subset of electronic health technology (e-health), it varies from traditional e-health in that it provides new options, including prospects for new business models and ubiquitous access to medical data (Abbas & Khan, 2014). Additionally, it reduces deployment and maintenance costs while easing the laborious work of managing medical information and infrastructure for healthcare organisations (Liu et al., 2019) as mentioned in Figure 1. Delivering sophisticated services and data exchange methods via the internet is becoming easier and easier thanks to cloud computing. Every patient would have an account containing his or her basic information under the proposed patient-cantered framework of the eHealth Cloud architecture. The doctors who register will also have account on eHealth Cloud. If a patient does not already have an account, the registered physician will create one for him before beginning therapy (Biswas et al., 2014). Everyone will eventually have an account. Through the patient identification number, the doctor may access the patient's medical history. While the logic layer executes rules for applications and offers UI for administrators (e.g., government ministries, hospitals), the client tier offers a sophisticated user interface (UI) for users (doctors, patients) to interact with the systems (Asif-Ur-Rahman et al., 2018).

The cloud platform may be used in a variety of ways such as; Public Cloud service provider will make resources accessible to both private and public users over the Internet for no-cost, ongoing, or demand-based uses that let customers pay only for the services they really use. The business can buy a virtual server and network rather than buying a real server and switching. A virtual server may be accessed from anywhere and can be turned on or off for minutes. The corporate infrastructure may be expanded using the public cloud, which relies on a tailored environment and enables the corporation to host some of its infrastructure and services on virtual yet distinguishable third-party servers (Razaque et al., 2019). Independent cloud that is publicly accessible is a structure that makes use of one company, one network, or one data centre to host services for a particular audience. The open-source cloud service makes it simple to use. While using a cloud that is private is more affordable than doing it publicly, it is more difficult to quantify. Equipment purchases will be necessary for infrastructure expansion or development. Similarly, costly assets and technologies are abused when demand for private clouds declines (Bouras et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2019).