While conducting research for the long overdue and nearly completed report on Personal Health Clouds (Dossia, Google Health and HealthVault) came across a recently published report by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) addressing cloud computing security. Though quite long (over 120 pages) the report provides a very comprehensive overview of cloud computing, its benefits, risks and some very good risk assessment tools to assist one in evaluating a cloud solution offering including segmentation by SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.
With the rapid migration to the “cloud computing” paradigm in the healthcare sector, be it personal health clouds, HIE vendors transitioning to PaaS vendors (note: Medicity made their own PaaS announcement yesterday – more to follow in near future), EMR vendors offering hosted solutions, to move to manage and store images in the cloud, and various niche vendors such as Medcommons, who uses Amazon to host its service, a report such as this is quite valuable and instructive both for potential users of cloud services as well as those offering them.
If you have even a remote interest in this subject, trust me, just get the report as it is one of the best I’ve come across to date.
Long report but very useful none the less. I find that people throw around the word “cloud computing” like its some ethereal entity when at its core, is merely networking. Larry Ellison had the same to say about cloud computing. Of course there will be privacy concerns. Information is being passed from one computer to another. More and more companies will be built on hosted solutions as the cost of bits goes down.
Along with privacy concerns – what will be used as a backup with cloud goes down? Networks tend to go down and mess up every now and then. Cloud computing sounds highly beneficial as long as it had a backup system.
Good Site on Cloud Computing and SaaS – We are periodically looking for good blog articles
related to SaaS. Will be back to review more information on your blog.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks
Abstract. Cloud Computing is emerging today as a commercial infrastructure that eliminates the need for maintaining expensive computing hardware. Through the use of virtualization, clouds promise to address with the same shared set of physical resources a large user base with different needs.