Cloud-based e-health systems: Security and privacy challenges and solutions

For a long time, the sensitivity and criticality of data storage, processing, and transmission have hindered the wide utilization of IT and networks in the health care systems. Recently, the high availability, reachability, reliability, efficiency, usability and automation provided by the different cloud computing models paved the way to integrate the e-health systems with these cloud services to improve their efficiencies. However, security and privacy still constitute the main concern in the current models of cloud computing for cloud-based e-health care systems. The convergence and integration of different services with different capabilities and ownerships means high risks on security and privacy of the data, which are not negotiable in e-health care systems. There have been many proposals to solve some of these concerns specifically or among other protocols. In this paper we define d ifferent s cenarios f or t he i ntegration of the e-health systems with the cloud computing systems. We also define the security and privacy requirements for these scenarios as well as the guidelines of the proposed solutions for the presented security and privacy problems.