An Affordable Hybrid Cloud Based Cluster for Secure Health Informatics Research

This article describes how a major risk factor in the deployment of patient health records systems in the cloud is the security and privacy of data. Hybrid cloud solutions have been proposed that leverage the public and private cloud deployment to manage and alleviate accessibility, access control and privacy concerns. This article presents a privacy preserving and secure architecture for data acquisition, storage, processing and sharing. The proposed architecture is composed of a public cloud-based services that interact with a low-cost cloud computing cluster (LoC4) as a backend. A lightweight data security eco-system based on attribute based encryption is developed to provide security for public cloud-based data storage. Performance of the deployment is evaluated in a real-time deployment environment. The results show that the proposed ABE-based system is 2.3 times faster than AES-based for a variety of sizes of data blocks. It is further noted that the low-cost and affordability of LoC4 platform offers excellent opportunities for academic research in cloud based health informatics.