Information security is generally discussed in terms of preventing adversarial access to applications and to the data these applications handle. The authors note, however, that increasingly, creating information security solutions that are based on the difficulty of discovering the solution is no longer a truly viable approach. Some of the reasons for this include the increasing availability of faster processing power, high-performance computing systems, and big data availability. On the opposite end, issues such as frequent power outages in resource-constrained environments make applying standard security schemes challenging. In this chapter, the authors discuss examples that highlight the challenges of applying conventional security solutions to constrained resource environments. They postulate that effective security solutions for these environments require rather unconventional approaches to security-solution design. Such solutions would need to take into consideration environmental and behavioral factors in addition to drawing inspiration in certain cases from natural or biological processes.
Electronic health record (EHR) systems are a popular mechanism for accessing health records in the developed world and have contributed towards improved and cost-effective health care management. However, the development of appropriate and scalable EHR systems in developing countries has been difficult to achieve because of certain limitations inherent in the technological infrastructure. In this paper, we present a comparative study of 19 EHR systems in terms of the security and usability of these systems within the context of the developing world. Our aim was to investigate whether online health services designed for developed countries can be adopted for EHR systems in developing countries. The investigation was based on a number of dimensions such as development environment, system platform, type and access control standards found in the National Institute for Standard and Technology (NIST) and Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT). Our research indicates that all the systems evaluated require online access control decisions. Solely relying on an online access control system is limiting, particularly in developing countries where access to the server can be disrupted by a number of disastrous events.
BACKGROUND The benefits of clouds to biomedical and health researchers especially consortia are tremendous spanning sequencing of instruments for health monitoring, image collection and archival, and analyses among others. The cloud enables On-demand access to researcher resources so that researchers can automatically consume them with minimal management effort. However, its wide adoption is staggeringly slow despite all these benefits due to a variety of challenges related to the availability and reliability of researcher applications, interoperability, ownership, security and privacy, and non-compliance to existing research regulations and laws. OBJECTIVE The main goal of this paper is to survey and map literature objectively to learn and discern what actually happens when biomedical and health research consortia activities and data are migrated onto the cloud. METHODS We investigate through literature, the application of Cloud computing paradigm within biomedical and health research, using publications from journals and scientific databases. RESULTS Findings indicate (a) a variety of biomedical and health research applications that we categorize as tools, platforms and storage archives, used for storing, enabling robust access and sharing, querying, and analyzing biomedical and health research data; (b)the paradigm’s adoption is extensive to include assistive care for elderly and the chronic, real time ECG monitoring and analysis, data management, picture archiving, and telemedicine; (c) that researchers need guidance on when to shift their endeavors to the cloud; (d) most applications are specific and limited in regards to flexibility and usability, confidentiality preservation, ownership, likelihood for collusion; (e)Data sharing and security models used by these applications have varied limitations, and their implementation requires that privacy and compliance to existing data protection regulations are observed. While resource sharing may be pivotal to biomedical consortia, utilizing the cloud for collaboration as a service requires that the service provision and consumption is complaint to the SLAs and related data protection regulations. The service is hoped that it is of high availability, scalable, secure and privacy-aware, yet biomedical and health research applications hosted for research consortia activities don’t entirely meet similar requirements CONCLUSIONS Therefore, the biomedical and health research cloud is complex with varied requirements for security and privacy, availability, scalability and trust. An attempt is proposed, “The Collab”, as a secure and a privacy-aware biomedical and health research collaboration cloud application. The Collab ensures that data under collaboration is secure, and infrastructure too, is privacy-aware, avails efficient and effective data auditing, and extended control beyond consortia boundary using a proxy-re- encryption and a 2-factor authentication. CLINICALTRIAL MUST/20/07-16
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