Design and implementation of security in healthcare cloud computing

As technology keeps on evolving, different organisations makeuse of the recent trends in technology and the health sector is no exception.As the cost of healthcare services is increasing, healthcare professionals arebecoming scarce. Healthcare organisations have also adopted the latesttechnology of cloud computing. The introduction of cloud computing hasproved to be a feasible idea on the information technology community.Rather than keeping the patient's information in a file in a health facilityhe/she was treated in, the information is stored in a cloud so that it can beshared amongst all health organisations and health professionals.Information is stored in a central place where it can be easily accessed, thussaving time and avoiding repetition of always writing the informationeach time a patient is attended to in a different facility. However, thereare issues with sharing such information on the cloud since it is sensitiveinformation. Ensuring this sensitive information security, availability andscalability are a major factor in the cloud computing environment. In thisstudy, we proposed a mathematical model for measuring the availabilityof data and machines (nodes). We also present the current state-of-the-artresearch in this field by focusing on several shortcomings of currenthealthcare solutions and standards and we further proposed a system thatwill encrypt data before it is being sent to the cloud. The system isintended to be linked to the cloud in such a way that, before the clientsubmits the data to the cloud and, the data will go through that system forencryption. The paper presents the steps to achieve the proposed systemand also a sample encrypted and decrypted file. © 2017 Molamoganyi Gorata, Adamu Murtala Zungeru, Mmoloki Mangwala and Joseph Chuma.