Health data in cloud environments

The process of provisioning healthcare involves massive healthcare data which exists in different forms on disparate data sources and in different formats. Consequently, health information systems encounter interoperability problems at many levels. Integrating these disparate systems requires the support at all levels of a very expensive infrastructures. Cloud computing dramatically reduces the expense and complexity of managing IT systems. Business customers do not need to invest in their own costly IT infrastructure, but can delegate and deploy their services effectively to Cloud vendors and service providers. It is inevitable that electronic health records (EHRs) and healthcare-related services will be deployed on cloud platforms to reduce the cost and complexity of handling and integrating medical records while improving efficiency and accuracy. The paper presents a review of EHR including definitions, EHR file formats, structures leading to the discussion of interoperability and security issues. The paper also presents challenges that have to be addressed for realizing Cloudbased healthcare systems: data protection and big health data management. Finally, the paper presents an active data model for housing and protecting EHRs in a Cloud environment

Active data-centric framework for data protection in cloud environment

Cloud computing is an emerging evolutionary computing model that provides highly scalable services over highspeed Internet on a pay-as-usage model. However, cloud-based solutions still have not been widely deployed in some sensitive areas, such as banking and healthcare. The lack of widespread development is related to users&rsquo; concern that their confidential data or privacy would leak out in the cloud&rsquo;s outsourced environment. To address this problem, we propose a novel active data-centric framework to ultimately improve the transparency and accountability of actual usage of the users&rsquo; data in cloud. Our data-centric framework emphasizes &ldquo;active&rdquo; feature which packages the raw data with active properties that enforce data usage with active defending and protection capability. To achieve the active scheme, we devise the Triggerable Data File Structure (TDFS). Moreover, we employ the zero-knowledge proof scheme to verify the request&rsquo;s identification without revealing any vital information. Our experimental outcomes demonstrate the efficiency, dependability, and scalability of our framework.<br /

A Trust-Based Approach for Management of Dynamic QoS Violations in Cloud Federation Environments

Cloud Federation is an emerging technology where Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offering specialized services to customers collaborate in order to reap the real benefits of Cloud Computing. When a CSP in the Cloud Federation runs out of resources, it can get the required resources from other partners in the federation. Normally, there will be QoS agreements between the partners in the federation for the resource sharing. In this paper, we propose a trust based mechanism for the management of dynamic QoS violations, when one CSP requests resources from another CSP in the federation. In this work, we have implemented the partner selection process, when one CSP does not have enough resources, using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods, and also considering the trust values of various CSPs in the federation. We have also implemented the Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication in the cloud federation using the Fully Hashed Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (FHMQV) protocol and AES-256 algorithm. The proposed trust-based approach is used to dynamically manage the QoS violations among the partners in the federation. We have implemented the proposed approach using the CloudSim toolkit, and the analysis of the results are also given

Preferences based Customized Trust Model for Assessment of Cloud Services

In cloud environment, many functionally similar cloud services are available. But, the services differ in Quality of Service (QoS) levels, offered by them. There is a diversity in user requirements about the expected qualities of cloud services. Trust is a measure to understand whether a cloud service can adequately meet the user requirements. Consequently, trust assessment plays a significant role in selecting the suitable cloud service. This paper proposes preferences based customized trust model (PBCTM) for trust assessment of cloud services. PBCTM takes into account user requirements about the expected quality of services in the form of preferences. Accordingly, it performs customized trust assessment based on the evidences of various attributes of cloud service. PBCTM enables elastic trust computation, which is responsive to dynamically changing user preferences with time. The model facilitates dynamic trust based periodic selection of cloud services according to varying user preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed preferences based customized trust model outperforms the other model in respect of accuracy and degree of satisfaction

Trustworthy Cloud Computing

Trustworthy cloud computing has been a central tenet of the European Union cloud strategy for nearly a decade. This chapter discusses the origins of trustworthy computing and specifically how the goals of trustworthy computing—security and privacy, reliability, and business integrity—are represented in computer science research. We call for further inter- and multi-disciplinary research on trustworthy cloud computing that reflect a more holistic view of trust

Broker-based service-oriented content adaptation framework

Electronic documents are becoming increasingly rich in content and varied in format and structure. At the same time, user preferences vary towards the contents and their devices are getting increasingly varied in capabilities. This mismatch between rich contents and user preferences along with the end device capability presents a challenge in providing ubiquitous access to these contents. Content adaptation is primarily used to bridge the mismatch by providing users with contents that is tailored to the given contexts e.g., device capability, preferences, or network bandwidth. Existing content adaptation systems employing these approaches such as client-side, server-side or proxy-side adaptation, operate in isolation, often encounter limited adaptation functionality, get overload if too many concurrent users and open to single point of failure, thus limiting the scope and scale of their services. To move beyond these shortcomings, this thesis establishes the basis for developing content adaptation solutions that are efficient and scalable. It presents a framework to enable content adaptation to be consumed as Web services provided by third-party service providers, which is termed as “service-oriented content adaptation”. Towards this perspective, this thesis addresses five key issues – how to enable content adaptation as services (serviceoriented framework); how to locate services in the network (service discovery protocol); how to select best possible services (path determination); how to provide quality assurance (service level agreement (SLA) framework); and how to negotiate quality of service (QoS negotiation). Specifically, we have: (i) identified the key research challenges for service-oriented content adaptation, along with a systematic understanding of the content adaptation research spectrum, captured in a taxonomy of content adaptation systems; (ii) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for enabling content adaptation as Web services, providing the facilities to serve clients’ content adaptation requests through the client-side brokering; (iii) developed a service discovery protocol, by taking into account the searching space, searching time, match type of the services and physical location of the service providers; (iv) developed a mechanism to choose the best possible combination of services to serve a given content adaptation request, considering QoS levels offered; (v) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for managing quality through the conceptualization of service level agreement; and (vi) introduced a strategy for QoS negotiation between multiple brokers and service providers, by taking into account the incoming requests and server utilization and, thus requiring the basis of determining serving priority and negotiating new QoS levels. The performance of the proposed solutions are compared with other competitive solutions and shown to be substantially better

Wedding planner in a box

Marriage describes the connection of two souls who promise to become one heart. Everyone dreams their marriage to be nearly perfect and that will happen only if they are able to make their wedding plan with best packages. In this busy world, many couples delay their wedding mainly because of high budget required to meet their dream wedding ceremony. Wedding ceremony requires careful and meticulous planning from many aspects such as choosing the food, make up, decoration, and gifts

Data Privacy and Trust in Cloud Computing

This open access book brings together perspectives from multiple disciplines including psychology, law, IS, and computer science on data privacy and trust in the cloud. Cloud technology has fueled rapid, dramatic technological change, enabling a level of connectivity that has never been seen before in human history. However, this brave new world comes with problems. Several high-profile cases over the last few years have demonstrated cloud computing's uneasy relationship with data security and trust. This volume explores the numerous technological, process and regulatory solutions presented in academic literature as mechanisms for building trust in the cloud, including GDPR in Europe. The massive acceleration of digital adoption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is introducing new and significant security and privacy threats and concerns. Against this backdrop, this book provides a timely reference and organising framework for considering how we will assure privacy and build trust in such a hyper-connected digitally dependent world. This book presents a framework for assurance and accountability in the cloud and reviews the literature on trust, data privacy and protection, and ethics in cloud computing