Enhancing the Security of Healthcare Data in Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud computing has completely evolved the way health care data is managed, but it also introduces critical security vulnerabilities that can compromise the privacy of patient information and threaten regulatory compliance. Herein, we present one of the most severe challenges: securing EHRs in a cloud environment with access to data while maintaining HIPAA compliance. We introduce a novel hybrid framework combining homomorphic encryption with blockchain-based access control and dynamic audit logging. The framework was used with a three-phase experimental approach and was deployed over five major healthcare institutions while being analyzed for 2.3 million patient records over 18 months. Results showed a high success rate of 99.97% against denial-of-service attacks while showing reductions in latency time about data retrieval up to 34% compared to traditional methods of encryption. Security-incident-based variation was reduced up to 78%, and 99.99% data integrity was achieved during concurrent access scenarios. Cost analysis shows that overheads in security management amount to a reduction of 45% against conventional systems. Our results show that the proposed framework is far better for healthcare data security, along with improved operational efficiency and regulatory compliance. This work contributes to the literature by providing a scalable and cost-efficient solution addressing the most complex security requirements of modern health care systems in cloud environments. The fact that the framework is implemented successfully in real life seems to reflect its effectiveness for mass-scale implementation in health organizations.