How to Manage Efficiently Clinical Big-Data by Means of Cloud Computing

Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are widely adopted in hospitals. Increasingly often medical devices are computer-assisted. Hospital Information Systems (HISs) are not designed to manage the huge amount of data produced by these devices. New paradigms, such as Cloud Computing, by means of its features represents a valid tool to handle this kind of problem. Cloud Computing is very powerful, but it arises issues concerning data privacy. For this reason, clinical operators are reluctant to adopt it in HISs. In this paper, considering two real use-cases coming from the IRCCS “Bonino Pulejo”, a clinical and research center in Messina, we discuss a Cloud Computing architecture able to manage amounts vast of medical data. From a technical point of view, the proposed solution is based on microservices each of them realized for performing a specified task, such as the anonymizer. A microservice that is able to obfuscate users’ sensitive data in order to assure data privacy and to make the system compliant with GDPR.