Enhancement of Cloud Computing Security in Health Care Sector

Now-a-days Healthcare Sectors to create a cloud computing environment to obtain a patient's complete medical record. This environment reduces time consuming efforts and other costly operations and uniformly integrates collection of medical data to deliver it to the healthcare specialists. Electronic Health Records have been usually implemented to enable healthcare providers and patients to create, manage and access healthcare information from at any time and any place. Cloud environment provide the essential infrastructure at lower cost and improved quality. The Healthcare sector reduces the cost of storing, processing and updating with improved efficiency and quality by using Cloud computing. But today the security of data in cloud environment is not adequate. The electronic health record consists of images of the patient’s record which is very confidential. The Electronic Health Records in the healthcare sector includes the scan images, X-rays, DNA reports etc., which are considered as the patients private data. It requires a very high degree of privacy and authentication. So, providing security for a large volume of data with high efficiency is required in cloud environment. This paper introduces a new mechanism in which the images of patient’s record can be secured efficiently and the private data are wellmaintained for later use. Since most of the private data are in the form of images, extra care must be taken to secure these images. This can be done by converting the images into pixels and then encrypting those pixels. After the encryption, the single encrypted file is divided into ‘n’ number of files and they are stored in the cloud database server. The original data is obtained by merging the n divided files from the cloud database server and then decrypting that merged file using the private key which is made visible only to the authorized persons as required by the hospital. To protect the data in cloud database server cryptography is one of the important methods. Cryptography provides several symmetric and asymmetric algorithms to secure the data. This paper presents the symmetric cryptographic algorithm named as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). KeywordsCloud environment, Electronic Health Record, Security, Healthcare Data, Encryption, Decryption, Cryptography, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).