E-health cloud: Privacy concerns and mitigation strategies

Abstract

Cloud based solutions have permeated in the healthcare domain due to a broad range of benefits offered by the cloud computing. Besides the financial advantages to the healthcare organizations, cloud computing also offers large-scale and on-demand storage and processing services to various entities of the cloud based health ecosystem. However, outsourcing the sensitive health information to the third-party cloud providers can result in serious privacy concerns. This chapter highlights the privacy issues related to the health data and also presents privacy preserving requirements. Besides the benefits of the cloud computing in healthcare, cloud computing deployment models are also discussed from the perspective of healthcare systems. Moreover, some recently developed strategies to mitigate the privacy concerns and to fulfil the privacy preserving requirements are also discussed in detail. Furthermore, strengths and weaknesses of each of the presented strategies are reported and some open issues for the future research are also presented.