LEVERAGING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY FOR SLA ENFORCEMENT IN HEALTH CARE CLOUD PARTNERSHIPS

The healthcare industry is rapidly adopting cloud-based solutions to improve operational efficiency and patient outcomes. However, healthcare cloud partnerships often face challenges related to the lack of scalability, trust, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) enforcement, and has a notable impact on consumer care quality. To address this issue, the study proposed leveraging blockchain technology to enhance SLA enforcement by using smart contracts in health care cloud partnerships for small and medium-sized facilities. The research questions were: Q.1 What are the current challenges facing small to medium sized healthcare facilities in enforcing SLAs in cloud partnerships? Q.2 How can BC-based smart contracts helps enhance scalability in cloud computing systems in healthcare SMEs by enforcing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in a safe and efficient manner? Q.3 What are the factors that affect the implementation of blockchain-based smart contracts for SLA enforcement in healthcare SMEs cloud partnerships? The project utilized case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of using BC technology based smart contracts to enhance SLA enforcement and improve patient outcomes. The findings and conclusions were as follows: 1. Current challenges facing healthcare SMEs in enforcing SLAs in cloud partnerships: SMEs may lack bargaining power, resources, and technical expertise to effectively negotiate, monitor, and enforce SLAs in cloud partnerships, leading to service disruptions, compliance issues, and financial losses. 2. BC-based smart contracts can enhance the scalability of cloud computing systems in healthcare SMEs by automating SLA execution, ensuring real-time data integrity, transparency, and accountability, reducing fraud, error, and transaction costs, and enabling decentralized trust among stakeholders. 3. Factors affecting the implementation of BC-based smart contracts to better SLA enforcement in healthcare SMEs cloud partnerships: regulatory uncertainty, interoperability, standardization, privacy, security, cost, complexity, governance, and user adoption, and 4. Unique Trends and challenges in the healthcare industry for its data analysis: increasing demand for real-time, patient-centered, personalized, and evidence-based care, generating and integrating large volumes of diverse and complex data from multiple sources, ensuring data quality, privacy, and security, complying with regulations and standards, and fostering collaboration and innovation across stakeholders. MedRec, SimplyVital Health, and Medical Chain demonstrate how BC provides secure data sharing, encryption and access control mechanisms, and promotes interoperability through standard data formats and protocols. Results showed improved scalability, trust, and SLA enforcement with the use of BC technology. Further research in the other domains of this area is recommended. It is required to address broader aspects related to the topic. The areas for further study that emerged from the findings and conclusions of this project include: 1. interoperability,2. trusted monitoring solutions, 3.user experience, 4. privacy and security,5. med tokens, cost and 6. integration with existing BSS and OSS. Keywords: Cloud computing, Blockchain technology, SLA enforcement, Smart Contracts, Healthcare cloud, Blockchain-based SLA enforcement, Smart Healthcare, e-healthcare, Scalability

Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017, Boston, MA, US

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications

A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed