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SECURING THE CLOUD: A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF DATA PROTECTION AND REGULATORY COMPLIANCE IN RULE-BASED ELIGIBILITY SYSTEMS
Abstract
The adoption of cloud-based rule systems for eligibility determination has revolutionized how organizations process and manage sensitive data across various sectors, including healthcare, government, and finance. However, this technological shift introduces complex challenges in maintaining data security and regulatory compliance. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the key security risks and compliance requirements associated with cloud-based eligibility determination systems. It examines the implications of handling sensitive personal, health, and financial data in cloud environments, exploring vulnerabilities such as data breaches, multi-tenancy risks, and challenges in data sovereignty. The article further investigates the intricate landscape of regulatory frameworks, including HIPAA, GDPR, FISMA, and SOC 2, elucidating their impact on system design and operation. By synthesizing current research and industry best practices, this paper proposes a robust framework for implementing secure and compliant cloud-based rule systems. The proposed strategies encompass advanced encryption techniques, stringent access controls, regular security audits, and vendor risk management, offering a holistic approach to mitigating risks while maintaining operational efficiency. This article contributes to the growing body of knowledge on cloud security and compliance, providing valuable insights for organizations seeking to leverage cloud technologies in eligibility determination processes while safeguarding sensitive information and adhering to evolving regulatory standards.
... Implementing role-based access control systems and automated compliance monitoring has revolutionized healthcare data security management [16]. Research indicates that healthcare organizations utilizing modern cloud platforms have achieved an 88% improvement in access control efficiency, with AI-powered systems processing and validating approximately 18,000 access requests daily with 99.2% accuracy [16]. ...
... Implementing role-based access control systems and automated compliance monitoring has revolutionized healthcare data security management [16]. Research indicates that healthcare organizations utilizing modern cloud platforms have achieved an 88% improvement in access control efficiency, with AI-powered systems processing and validating approximately 18,000 access requests daily with 99.2% accuracy [16]. Regular security audits and penetration testing have revealed that cloud-based healthcare systems successfully identify and mitigate 92% of potential security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, representing a significant improvement over the 67% detection rate of traditional security measures [16]. ...
... Research indicates that healthcare organizations utilizing modern cloud platforms have achieved an 88% improvement in access control efficiency, with AI-powered systems processing and validating approximately 18,000 access requests daily with 99.2% accuracy [16]. Regular security audits and penetration testing have revealed that cloud-based healthcare systems successfully identify and mitigate 92% of potential security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, representing a significant improvement over the 67% detection rate of traditional security measures [16]. The integration of automated compliance monitoring tools has enabled healthcare providers to maintain continuous HIPAA compliance with 98.7% accuracy while reducing compliance-related administrative overhead by 62%. ...
This comprehensive article examines the transformative impact of cloud computing technologies on healthcare delivery systems, focusing on scalable transaction systems for patient data management and real-time diagnostics. The article explores how cloud-based solutions have revolutionized electronic health records management, improved data accessibility, and enhanced diagnostic capabilities across healthcare facilities worldwide. The article investigates the implementation of advanced security protocols, interoperability frameworks, and artificial intelligence integration in healthcare cloud computing. Through analysis of multiple case studies and industry-wide implementations, the article demonstrates how cloud technologies have fundamentally altered healthcare delivery models, enabling improved patient care outcomes, operational efficiency, and cost-effectiveness while maintaining robust security and compliance standards.
... Furthermore, the end-to-end encryption, has to be incorporated where possible, confirming that data remains endangered throughout its complete lifecycle. The main considerations for operational encryption has included the usage of HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) for securing the main management, regularly informing encryption algorithms for tackling the rising exposures and instigating homomorphic encryption, which has permitted the processing of encrypted data without the essential for decryption which has been predominantly useful in cloud-based rule systems where maintaining data confidentiality during processing is important [43]. Additionally, the Incident response has been the precarious feature of upholding the security and functionality of cloud-based systems. ...
The SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) becomes a keystone for upholding and enlightening the performance and dependability of modern cloud-based applications. As the businesses progressively transfer to the cloud, SRE backgrounds are developing to ensure system availability, scalability and cost effectiveness. Hence, this review details the incorporation of cloud infrastructure and automation in the context of SRE, examining its influence on operational practices, system visibility, security and cost management. With the development of cloud-native technologies, automation tools such as Kubernetes, Dockers and cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are considerably augmenting the abilities of SRE teams. The review elaborates into the foundations of SRE, highlighting the acute role of cloud infrastructure in mechanizing repetitive tasks, confirming high availability and optimizing resource usage. The main elements such as monitoring, logging and system visibility are emphasized as dynamic components for effective SRE. Additionally, exploration of how cloud-based security protocols incorporates into SRE strategies, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and system reliability is detailed. Cost optimization in cloud infrastructure is additional major area of focus, where FinOps practices and AI-driven visions assists the organizations control spending while preserving service dependability. Even though these improvements, challenges such as handling large-scale systems, matching resource allocation and tackling the security risks remains. Therefore, emerging trends such as ML (Machine Learning) for predictive maintenance and the shift towards server less architectures, posing visions into the future of cloud-based SRE.
Precision health leverages information from various sources, including omics, lifestyle, environment, social media, medical records, and medical insurance claims to enable personalized care, prevent and predict illness, and precise treatments. It extensively uses sensing technologies (e.g., electronic health monitoring devices), computations (e.g., machine learning), and communication (e.g., interaction between the health data centers). As health data contain sensitive private information, including the identity of patient and carer and medical conditions of the patient, proper care is required at all times. Leakage of these private information affects the personal life, including bullying, high insurance premium, and loss of job due to the medical history. Thus, the security, privacy of and trust on the information are of utmost importance. Moreover, government legislation and ethics committees demand the security and privacy of healthcare data. Besides, the public, who is the data source, always expects the security, privacy, and trust of their data. Otherwise, they can avoid contributing their data to the precision health system. Consequently, as the public is the targeted beneficiary of the system, the effectiveness of precision health diminishes. Herein, in the light of precision health data security, privacy, ethical and regulatory requirements, finding the best methods and techniques for the utilization of the health data, and thus precision health is essential. In this regard, firstly, this paper explores the regulations, ethical guidelines around the world, and domain-specific needs. Then it presents the requirements and investigates the associated challenges. Secondly, this paper investigates secure and privacy-preserving machine learning methods suitable for the computation of precision health data along with their usage in relevant health projects. Finally, it illustrates the best available techniques for precision health data security and privacy with a conceptual system model that enables compliance, ethics clearance, consent management, medical innovations, and developments in the health domain.
Features such as elasticity, scalability, universal access, low entry cost, and flexible billing motivate consumers to migrate their core businesses to the cloud. However, in doing so there are challenges about security, privacy, and compliance. Businesses are pressured to comply with regulations depending on their service types; for example, in the US government agencies are required to comply with FISMA, healthcare organizations are required to comply with HIPAA; public retail companies must to comply with SOX and PCI. We survey work on compliance issues and we conclude that the lack of reference architectures and relevant patterns makes compliance harder than it should be. We also explore current industrial trends of compliance approaches. We end by summarizing compliance issues and give some guidelines about what this architecture and its corresponding patterns should contain.
Today, most of the organizations trust on their age old legacy applications, to support their business-critical systems. However, there are several critical concerns, as maintainability and scalability issues, associated with the legacy system. In this background, cloud services offer a more agile and cost effective platform, to support business applications and IT infrastructure. As the adoption of cloud services has been increasing recently and so has been the academic research in cloud migration. However, there is a genuine need of secondary study to further strengthen this research. The primary objective of this paper is to scientifically and systematically identify, categorize and compare the existing research work in the area of legacy to cloud migration. The paper has also endeavored to consolidate the research on Security issues, which is prime factor hindering the adoption of cloud through classifying the studies on secure cloud migration. SLR (Systematic Literature Review) of thirty selected papers, published from 2009 to 2014 was conducted to properly understand the nuances of the security framework. To categorize the selected studies, authors have proposed a conceptual model for cloud migration which has resulted in a resource base of existing solutions for cloud migration. This study concludes that cloud migration research is in seminal stage but simultaneously it is also evolving and maturing, with increasing participation from academics and industry alike. The paper also identifies the need for a secure migration model, which can fortify organization's trust into cloud migration and facilitate necessary tool support to automate the migration process.
In the last few years, the appealing features of cloud computing have been fueling the integration of cloud environments in the industry, which has been consequently motivating the research on related technologies by both the industry and the academia. The possibility of paying-as-you-go mixed with an on-demand elastic operation is changing the enterprise computing model, shifting on-premises infrastructures to off-premises data centers, accessed over the Internet and managed by cloud hosting providers. Regardless of its advantages, the transition to this computing paradigm raises security concerns, which are the subject of several studies. Besides of the issues derived from Web technologies and the Internet, clouds introduce new issues that should be cleared out first in order to further allow the number of cloud deployments to increase. This paper surveys the works on cloud security issues, making a comprehensive review of the literature on the subject. It addresses several key topics, namely vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks, proposing a taxonomy for their classification. It also contains a thorough review of the main concepts concerning the security state of cloud environments and discusses several open research topics.
Cloud computing is clearly one of today's most enticing technology areas due, at least in part, to its cost-efficiency and flexibility. However, despite the surge in activity and interest, there are significant, persistent concerns about cloud computing that are impeding momentum and will eventually compromise the vision of cloud computing as a new IT procurement model. In this paper, we characterize the problems and their impact on adoption. In addition, and equally importantly, we describe how the combination of existing research thrusts has the potential to alleviate many of the concerns impeding adoption. In particular, we argue that with continued research advances in trusted computing and computation-supporting encryption, life in the cloud can be advantageous from a business intelligence standpoint over the isolated alternative that is more common today.
Over the internet, the cloud computing reveals a remarkable potential to provide on-demand services to consumers with greater flexibility in a cost effective manner. While moving towards the concept of on-demand service, resource pooling, shifting everything on the distributive environment, security is the major obstacle for this new dreamed vision of computing capability. This survey present a comprehensive overview of the security issues for different factors affecting cloud computing. Furthermore, a detailed discussion on several key topics regarding embedded system, application, storage system, clustering related issues and many more. This paper works on some public cloud and private cloud authorities as well as related security concerns. Additionally, it encompasses the requirements for better security management and suggests 3-tier security architecture. Open issues with discussion in which some new security concepts and recommendations are also provided.
Context
Cloud computing is a thriving paradigm that supports an efficient way to provide IT services by introducing on-demand services and flexible computing resources. However, significant adoption of cloud services is being hindered by security issues that are inherent to this new paradigm. In previous work, we have proposed ISGcloud, a security governance framework to tackle cloud security matters in a comprehensive manner whilst being aligned with an enterprise’s strategy.
Objective
Although a significant body of literature has started to build up related to security aspects of cloud computing, the literature fails to report on evidence and real applications of security governance frameworks designed for cloud computing environments. This paper introduces a detailed application of ISGCloud into a real life case study of a Spanish public organisation, which utilises a cloud storage service in a critical security deployment.
Method
The empirical evaluation has followed a formal process, which includes the definition of research questions previously to the framework’s application. We describe ISGcloud process and attempt to answer these questions gathering results through direct observation and from interviews with related personnel.
Results
The novelty of the paper is twofold: on the one hand, it presents one of the first applications, in the literature, of a cloud security governance framework to a real-life case study along with an empirical evaluation of the framework that proves its validity; on the other hand, it demonstrates the usefulness of the framework and its impact to the organisation.
Conclusion
As discussed on the paper, the application of ISGCloud has resulted in the organisation in question achieving its security governance objectives, minimising the security risks of its storage service and increasing security awareness among its users.
Virtualization is a pillar technology in cloud computing for multiplexing computing resources on a single cloud platform for multiple cloud tenants. Monitoring the behavior of virtual machines (VMs) on a cloud platform is a critical requirement for cloud tenants. Existing monitoring mechanisms on virtualized platforms either takes a complete VM as the monitoring granularity, such that they cannot capture the malicious behaviors within individual VMs, or they focus on specific monitoring functions that cannot be used for heterogeneous VMs concurrently running on a single cloud node. Furthermore, the existing monitoring mechanisms have made an assumption that the privileged domain is trusted to act as expected, which causes the cloud tenants' concern about security because the privileged domain in fact could not act as the tenants' expectation. We design a trusted monitoring framework, which provides a chain of trust that excludes the untrusted privileged domain, by deploying an independent guest domain for the monitoring purpose, as well as utilizing the trusted computing technology to ensure the integrity of the monitoring environment. Moreover, the feature of fine-grained and general monitoring is also provided. We have implemented the proposed monitoring framework on Xen, and integrated it into OpenNebula. Our experimental results show that it can offer expected functionality, and bring moderate performance overhead.
Cloud computing is a cutting edge technology. eHealth is one promising application of this technology. In this paper, we describe a prototype implementation of an HL7-based eHealth application on the cloud. The system is secured with a risk-aware task-based access control. We demonstrate that our access control technique is more effective for preventing unauthorized access of medical information when compared to context-aware access controls, with a small access delay of approximately one second.
Cloud computing is a new computational paradigm
that offers an innovative business model for organizations to
adopt IT without upfront investment. Despite the potential gains
achieved from the cloud computing, the model security is still
questionable which impacts the cloud model adoption. The
security problem becomes more complicated under the cloud
model as new dimensions have entered into the problem scope
related to the model architecture, multi-tenancy, elasticity, and
layers dependency stack. In this paper we introduce a detailed
analysis of the cloud security problem. We investigated the
problem from the cloud architecture perspective, the cloud
offered characteristics perspective, the cloud stakeholders’
perspective, and the cloud service delivery models perspective.
Based on this analysis we derive a detailed specification of the
cloud security problem and key features that should be covered by
any proposed security solution.
Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm for large scale infrastructures. It has the advantage of reducing cost by sharing computing and storage resources, combined with an on-demand provisioning mechanism relying on a pay-per-use business model. These new features have a direct impact on the budgeting of IT budgeting but also affect traditional security, trust and privacy mechanisms. Many of these mechanisms are no longer adequate, but need to be rethought to fit this new paradigm. In this paper we assess how security, trust and privacy issues occur in the context of cloud computing and discuss ways in which they may be addressed.
Cloud computing refers to subscription-based, fee-for-service utilization of computer hardware and software over the Internet. The model is gaining acceptance for business information technology (IT) applications because it allows capacity and functionality to increase on the fly without major investment in infrastructure, personnel or licensing fees. Large IT investments can be converted to a series of smaller operating expenses. Cloud architectures could potentially be superior to traditional electronic health record (EHR) designs in terms of economy, efficiency and utility. A central issue for EHR developers in the US is that these systems are constrained by federal regulatory legislation and oversight. These laws focus on security and privacy, which are well-recognized challenges for cloud computing systems in general. EHRs built with the cloud computing model can achieve acceptable privacy and security through business associate contracts with cloud providers that specify compliance requirements, performance metrics and liability sharing.