Legality and Considerations for Healthcare Chief Information Officers Migrating to the Public Cloud

There are many advantages for healthcare organizations to use the public cloud for storage/computing. However, moving data outside of the organization’s physical boundaries implies lost or reduced control and greater reliance on Cloud Service Providers (CSP) in determining where the data is stored and how it is secured. When that data is sensitive healthcare data and at high-risk for cyber/national security violations as well as, belonging to U.S. citizens, the need for careful planning and legal compliance increases sharply. The following study evaluates the legality and considerations of public cloud use for healthcare Chief Information Officers (CIO) and the need for holistic federal regulation in order to protect healthcare data from foreign and domestic threats. Healthcare CIO’s cannot continue to wait to move into the next century of technologies due to the current lack of legislative protection, which is hindering their ability to act swiftly and confidently in front of their board members, executives, peers, employees, and patients. In this study, we prove a need for the US legislative system to provide a unified legal framework that protects and enables healthcare organization to migrate their workloads/data to the public cloud using CSP’s without fear of retaliation through the US legal system

Hybrid clouds for data-Intensive, 5G-Enabled IoT applications: an overview, key issues and relevant architecture

Hybrid cloud multi-access edge computing (MEC) deployments have been proposed as efficient means to support Internet of Things (IoT) applications, relying on a plethora of nodes and data. In this paper, an overview on the area of hybrid clouds considering relevant research areas is given, providing technologies and mechanisms for the formation of such MEC deployments, as well as emphasizing several key issues that should be tackled by novel approaches, especially under the 5G paradigm. Furthermore, a decentralized hybrid cloud MEC architecture, resulting in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is proposed and its main building blocks and layers are thoroughly described. Aiming to offer a broad perspective on the business potential of such a platform, the stakeholder ecosystem is also analyzed. Finally, two use cases in the context of smart cities and mobile health are presented, aimed at showing how the proposed PaaS enables the development of respective IoT applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Critical analysis of vendor lock-in and its impact on cloud computing migration: a business perspective

Vendor lock-in is a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing, due to the lack of standardization. Current solutions and efforts tackling the vendor lock-in problem are predominantly technology-oriented. Limited studies exist to analyse and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Consequently, most customers are unaware of proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors. This paper provides a critical analysis of the vendor lock-in problem, from a business perspective. A survey based on qualitative and quantitative approaches conducted in this study has identified the main risk factors that give rise to lock-in situations. The analysis of our survey of 114 participants shows that, as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud, the vendor lock-in problem is exacerbated. Furthermore, the findings exemplify the importance of interoperability, portability and standards in cloud computing. A number of strategies are proposed on how to avoid and mitigate lock-in risks when migrating to cloud computing. The strategies relate to contracts, selection of vendors that support standardised formats and protocols regarding standard data structures and APIs, developing awareness of commonalities and dependencies among cloud-based solutions. We strongly believe that the implementation of these strategies has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in

Decision Modeling for Healthcare Enterprise IT Architecture Utilizing Cloud Computing

In this paper, we present an overview of cloud computing, examine the potential uses for cloud computing in healthcareenvironments, and propose a framework to guide architectural selection decisions regarding information systems in bothlarge and small healthcare organizations. The framework provides insight to both practitioners and academics by extendingour understanding of the decisions regarding computing architectures within the healthcare system

A Decade of Research in Fog computing: Relevance, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time applications, have led to the unprecedented growth in the connected devices and their generated data. Traditionally, this sensor data is transferred and processed at the cloud, and the control signals are sent back to the relevant actuators, as part of the IoT applications. This cloud-centric IoT model, resulted in increased latencies and network load, and compromised privacy. To address these problems, Fog Computing was coined by Cisco in 2012, a decade ago, which utilizes proximal computational resources for processing the sensor data. Ever since its proposal, fog computing has attracted significant attention and the research fraternity focused at addressing different challenges such as fog frameworks, simulators, resource management, placement strategies, quality of service aspects, fog economics etc. However, after a decade of research, we still do not see large-scale deployments of public/private fog networks, which can be utilized in realizing interesting IoT applications. In the literature, we only see pilot case studies and small-scale testbeds, and utilization of simulators for demonstrating scale of the specified models addressing the respective technical challenges. There are several reasons for this, and most importantly, fog computing did not present a clear business case for the companies and participating individuals yet. This paper summarizes the technical, non-functional and economic challenges, which have been posing hurdles in adopting fog computing, by consolidating them across different clusters. The paper also summarizes the relevant academic and industrial contributions in addressing these challenges and provides future research directions in realizing real-time fog computing applications, also considering the emerging trends such as federated learning and quantum computing.Comment: Accepted for publication at Wiley Software: Practice and Experience journa

Managing the outsourcing of information security processes: the 'cloud' solution

Information security processes and systems are relevant for any organization and involve medium-to-high investment; however, the current economic downturn is causing a dramatic reduction in spending on Information Technology (IT). Cloud computing (i.e., externalization of one or more IT services) might be a solution for organizations keen to maintain a good level of security. In this paper we discuss whether cloud computing is a valid alternative to in-house security processes and systems drawing on four mini-case studies of higher education institutions in New England, US. Our findings show that the organization’s IT spending capacity affects the choice to move to the cloud; however, the perceived security of the cloud and the perceived in-house capacity to provide high quality IT (and security) services moderate this relationship. Moreover, other variables such as (low) quality of technical support, relatively incomplete contracts, poor defined Service License Agreements (SLA), and ambiguities over data ownership affect the choice to outsource IT (and security) using the cloud. We suggest that, while cloud computing could be a useful means of IT outsourcing, there needs to be a number of changes and improvements to how the service is currently delivered

Cloud Computing as a Catalyst for Integrated Health Information Systems in Developing Countries

Cloud Computing is increasingly becoming important in the generation, storage and transmission of information worldwide. In this paper, we discuss the potential of Cloud Computing in terms of how it can strengthen health information systems in developing countries. Like any new technology, Cloud Computing is no silver bullet; it solves certain challenges while bringing new ones to the table. Based on a case study of the innovative use of Cloud Computing for the national health information system in Kenya, we discuss how Cloud Computing can enable the integration and harmonization of fragmented systems and provide real-time information to health managers for evidence based decision making. The key contribution of the paper is to provide an understanding of how Cloud Computing can enhance health management by acting as a catalyst for the integration of health information systems