A dynamic cloud computing platform for eHealth systems

Cloud Computing technology offers new opportunities for outsourcing data, and outsourcing computation to individuals, start-up businesses, and corporations in health care. Although cloud computing paradigm provides interesting, and cost effective opportunities to the users, it is not mature, and using the cloud introduces new obstacles to users. For instance, vendor lock-in issue that causes a healthcare system rely on a cloud vendor infrastructure, and it does not allow the system to easily transit from one vendor to another. Cloud data privacy is another issue and data privacy could be violated due to outsourcing data to a cloud computing system, in particular for a healthcare system that archives and processes sensitive data. In this paper, we present a novel cloud computing platform based on a Service-Oriented cloud architecture. The proposed platform can be ran on the top of heterogeneous cloud computing systems that provides standard, dynamic and customizable services for eHealth systems. The proposed platform allows heterogeneous clouds provide a uniform service interface for eHealth systems that enable users to freely transfer their data and application from one vendor to another with minimal modifications. We implement the proposed platform for an eHealth system that maintains patients' data privacy in the cloud. We consider a data accessibility scenario with implementing two methods, AES and a light-weight data privacy method to protect patients' data privacy on the proposed platform. We assess the performance and the scalability of the implemented platform for a massive electronic medical record. The experimental results show that the proposed platform have not introduce additional overheads when we run data privacy protection methods on the proposed platform.