Secured storage and retrieval of documents in cloud environment

Abstract

Recent advancements in medical technology help in sustaining health while improving lifespan of human community. Though several other areas like biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, biomedical instrumentations and many more have contributed towards the advancement of healthcare domain, a significant continuous support from Information Technology (IT) keeps it blooming. Healthcare information management and exchange have become more important for fast and accurate decision making on disease diagnosis and to align the decision with appropriate treatment. Very efficient and simple adoptive information management systems like cloud computing facilitate the healthcare professionals in the effective handling of healthcare data. For voluminous medical records generated from healthcare centers, the cloud data centres have become an efficient refuge. As the data stored in cloud data centres are taken care by third parties, the data owners are free from data maintenance. The data centres enable the data owners to access their data at any time round the clock irrespective of their place. In addition to data storage, medical data processing is also supported by cloud computing. All the IT resources such as processing capacity, storage space, network bandwidth and software can be obtained based on the requirements from cloud. All these valuable benefits attract the healthcare centers towards the cloud. Generally, medical documents may involve certain sensitive information which may not be desired to be disclosed to public. It is expected that only the healthcare professionals who are treating the patients should refer to the patients medical documents. When the data are maintained in remote data centres, it is not possible to have any kind of faith on third parties who are responsible for the data centres. newline