Securely Leveraging Hybrid Clouds for Healthcare Data Processing

Most public cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon provide customers little insight into their underlying security models beyond touting their certifications. Healthcare cloud customers have been reluctant to use these public clouds due to the need to add additional layers of infrastructure and security to satisfy internal audit processes and heavy regulatory requirements. Typically, the traditional compute model for processing of complex data sets is built on costly secured internal infrastructure that requires far too much fixed capital, has high overhead expenses, and does not deliver the desired results in real time. This represents a real opportunity to find a way to leverage the benefits of the public cloud without compromising control or security.

The i-Path conceptual model is a foundation for creating secure, elastic-computing environments that take advantage of the best of both public and private clouds infrastructures for application service delivery. By taking advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud for real-time processing of healthcare data, there is an opportunity for reducing capital costs and delivery latency by using appropriate IT resources, wherever they are located, more efficiently. This new hybrid cloud approach extends the enterprise processing power to the cloud, yet maintains the stringent security models required by regulators.

i-Path is a series of containers that includes a foundational library, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and a Service Catalog; all layered on a secured message queue that packages private data for processing in the public cloud.

• Enterprise Service Broker – provides a secured pathway from private to public cloud environments
• Reliable Message Service – provides a processing service to manage messages between the private and public cloud environments
• Service Catalog – provides a suite of applications to support pre-defined workflows, cloud orchestration and security containers

This model can be safely applied to clinical trials data analysis, claims processing and research analytics.

During this interactive session you will learn the basic principles behind how i-Path works and how it can be applied to a variety of use cases in the healthcare vertical. Topics that will be addressed include:

• The advantages and disadvantages of a hybrid cloud approach in the healthcare setting and the ways that i-Path can increase value while mitigating the risks
• A discussion of the i-Path multi-layer architecture and how it works to securely bridge public/private cloud environments
• Use cases for this architecture includes: real-time claims processing, clinical trial data analysis and other burst and compute intensive workloads