Secure Cloud Operations: Balancing Compliance, Data Privacy, and Performance in Healthcare Systems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9246.IJETCSIT-V6I4P112Keywords:
Clouds, Secure Clouds, Data Privacy, Healthcare, Compliance, Cloud Computing, ePHIAbstract
Modern healthcare systems have turned to cloud computing as a cornerstone that provides scalability, agility, cost-efficiency and opportunities to support telemedicine, large scale data analytics and patient centric services. Yet, the safe use of healthcare clouds requires a fine balance between three tendencies, which seem to conflict with each other, including regulation protection (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR), protection of data privacy of electronic protected health information (ePHI), and high performance and availability of the system needed by clinical activities. In this paper, the researcher explores the manner through which healthcare organisations can design and deploy cloud operations to meet all the three dimensions concurrently. We discuss major security, privacy, and performance issues in cloud based healthcare setting based on recent empirical and industry findings [1], [2]. We next suggest a framework with compliance automation, privacy by design implementation, and performance conscious cloud configuration and monitoring. We discuss certain tradeoffs that can be made, like the overheads of encryption versus latency, the depth of auditing/logging versus throughput, multitenant resource isolation versus cost/performance efficiency. The knowledge gained in case studies reveals to change agents how their healthcare facilities can employ adaptive policy engines, data classification levels, and control levels, auto-scaling resources, and real time monitoring in order to ensure compliance, privacy protection, and service level assurance. Lastly, there are implications to governance, vendor management and continuous assurance in healthcare clouds which we discuss. The results indicate that there is no single silver bullet; instead success is based on an integrated model of functioning, cross functional teamwork, and constant balancing between controls and performance. We conclude and make our own recommendations on best practice by healthcare system operators wishing to implement icyes operations in a high performance regulated environment
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References
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