Toward designing a secure biosurveillance cloud

Abstract

Biosurveillance is very complex, and it complements traditional public health surveillance to provide both early warning of infectious disease events and leads to situational awareness as well as to signaling any potential threat for using biological agents as weapons of mass destruction. Biosurveillance requires close cooperation and rapid information-sharing among many healthcare partners including primary care units and the biosurveillance hubs. Achieving improvements in this direction has become a bipartisan top priority for governments and institutions. Currently there are many national and international centers envisioned as clouds for intelligence on biological threats, however security obstacles have hindered their progress. This article investigates the requirements for a biosurveillance secure cloud. The investigation identifies the major security components needed to build a trusted environment for cloud based biosurveillance system through the integration of the public health enterprise private cloud with public clouds based on the Distributed OSGi framework along with a distributed authentication service. The trusted environment allows biosurveillance to be conducted over primary care private clouds including patient information from the electronic medical records. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.