Artificial intelligence-powered cloud security strategies for protecting critical clinical operations in healthcare environments

The increasing use of cloud computing in hospitals, telemedicine, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and real-time patient monitoring has made for an increasing trend of artificial intelligence-driven cloud security in hospitals. The growing reliance on distributed healthcare clouds layers the cyber-attack surface, however, with critical clinical operations now at risk from ransomware attacks, insider threats, API exploitation, and advanced persistent attacks. This research study introduces a novel AI-integrated cloud security framework tailored for safeguarding mission critical applications in the healthcare sector featuring an intelligent threat detection component, a probabilistic risk evaluation system, and an adaptive response orchestration system. The proposed architecture is built-in by using telemetry normalization, probabilistic behaviour modelling, deep autoencoders for anomaly detection, Bayesian approach for threat probability estimation, multi-objective risk scoring and reinforcement learning for adaptive mitigation. An experimental validation was performed with the CICIDS2017 dataset including around two million samples of network traffic data across various attack categories. The experimental results show that excellent performances have been achieved with an accuracy of 0.96, precision of 0.95, recall of 0.94, F1score of 0.95 and AUC of 0.98 with low latency of around 26 ms and reduced false positive rate of 0.03. A comparative analysis against the current cloud security methods also confirms the effectiveness of the proposed framework in delivering better operational security, response time and the availability of clinical services, providing the continuous clinical service that healthcare organizations require. The research showcases how incorporating AI with responsive cloud security mechanisms can offer a scalable and resilient defense against today's healthcare cloud infrastructures.