Securing the e-health cloud

Abstract

Modern information technology is increasingly used in healthcare with the goal to improve and enhance medical services and to reduce costs. In this context, the outsourcing of computation and storage resources to general IT providers (cloud computing) has become very appealing. E-health clouds offer new possibilities, such as easy and ubiquitous access to medical data, and opportunities for new business models. However, they also bear new risks and raise challenges with respect to security and privacy aspects. In this paper, we point out several shortcomings of current e-health solutions and standards, particularly they do not address the client platform security, which is a crucial aspect for the overall security of e-health systems. To fill this gap, we present a security architecture for establishing privacy domains in e-health infrastructures. Our solution provides client platform security and appropriately combines this with network security concepts. Moreover, we discuss further open problems and research challenges on security, privacy and usability of e-health cloud systems.