Sanjay P. Ahuja

A Survey of the State of Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Analysts, researchers and organizations alike seem to agree that cloud computing will be a defining trend in the coming decade impacting wide range of businesses and how those businesses are practiced. Large technology companies are already investing millions of dollars in building infrastructure, services, tools and applications to facilitate cloud computing for consumers, organizations and businesses to use and take advantage. It remains to be seen how cloud computing will impact the healthcare business since it is very diverse, complex and unique and presents several challenges such as protecting members health records in addition to following HIPAA guidelines set by federal compliance regulations. In addition to these the rising cost of healthcare solutions is another major concern. Efforts are being made to reduce these costs for consumers and IT will play a big role in achieving it and also improving clinical and quality outcomes for patients. It will be very interesting to see how cloud computing will address and contribute towards these issues in the healthcare industry. The purpose of this paper is to explore the current state and trends of cloud computing in healthcare.

A Survey on Wireless Grid Computing

Wireless Grid computing extends the traditional Grid computing paradigm to include a diverse collection of mobile devices enabled to communicate using radio frequency, infrared, optical and other wireless mechanisms. Among the devices coming into use in wireless grid implementations are tiny sensors, Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFID). Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and paging devices, cellular phones, hand-held or wearable computers, laptop computers and special purpose computers embedded into many modern appliances [8, 26, 29]. Though many of these devices were initially developed to serve a specific, autonomous purpose, their potential for cooperation through the sharing of resources and capabilities, and the massive amounts of resources available due to their numbers, is quickly leading to applications resembling traditional Grid computing.This paper presents a survey of the current state of wireless grid computing. This includes a discussion of the cooperation between wired and wireless grids including ways in which wireless grids extend the capabilities of existing wired grids. It also discusses many of the new capabilities and resources available to wireless grid devices and a sampling of several applications of these new resources. It provides a sampling of many current research endeavors in the wireless grid arena and an examination of a number of the potential challenges resulting from the unique characteristics of wireless grid devices.

An Introduction to RFID Technology

RFID technology emerged some time back and was not used that much because of lack of standardization and high costs. Latest technologies have brought costs down and standards are being developed. Today RFID is mostly used as a medium for numerous tasks including managing supply chains, tracking livestock, preventing counterfeiting, controlling building access, and supporting automated checkout. The use of RFID is limited by security concerns and delays in standardization. This paper describes RFID technology and its applications in today’s world.

State of Big Data Analysis in the Cloud

Big Data is data that either is too large, grows too fast, or does not fit into traditional architectures. Within such data can be valuable information that can be discovered through data analysis. With the emergence of cloud computing services, big data processing has become a less costly task. In this paper, we examine the current trends and characteristics of Big Data, its analysis and how these are presenting challenges in data collection, storage and management in cloud computing.

Availability of Services in the Era of Cloud Computing

One of the most important areas for consumers is security, performance and availability when it comes to cloud computing. Availability refers to the uptime of a system, a network of systems, hardware and software that collectively provide a service during its usage. Traditionally the availability of these has been limited to local installations of hardware and software resources which businesses and consumers deployed and maintained. With the advent of cloud services there is a considerable shift of these resources into the cloud. While cloud computing presents some cost effective benefits for the consumers and businesses, it is also extremely important for the cloud service providers to offer environments that are highly scalable and high in availability. This will in many ways dictate the credibility of these cloud services. Regardless of the size of an organization prolonged downtime of the service might be disastrous to its business, customer loyalty and brand value. This paper discusses the state of availability of services in the cloud.

Survey of the State-of-the-Art of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing as a computational model has gathered tremendous traction. It is not completely clear what this term represents though it generally is thought to include a pay-as-you model for computation and storage. This paper explains what Cloud Computing is and contrasts it with Grid computing. It describes the major cloud services offered, discusses architectural details, and gives details about the infrastructure of Cloud Computing. This paper surveys the state of cloud computing and associated research and discusses the probable directions to the future of this evolving field of computing.

Successful combination therapy of a proximal haemophilic pseudotumour with surgery, radiation and embolization in a child with mild haemophilia A

Summary.  We describe the management of a young boy with mild haemophilia A and a massive iliac pseudotumour with a multi modality approach involving factor replacement, radiation therapy, embolization and surgery. The patient was initially treated with recombinant factor VIII and radiation therapy. Because of inadequate response and worsening of bony erosion, the patient had a preoperative embolization followed by surgical excision. The surgical procedure was associated with minimal blood loss and the patient had a relatively smooth postoperative course with no physical morbidity. This case illustrates successful aggressive management of a large, proximally located pelvic pseudotumour, which resulted in an excellent outcome despite the need for a normally morbid operation.

A Survey of Cloud Computing and Social Networks

In recent years there has been rapid growth in cloud computing and social networking technologies. Cloud computing shifts the computing resources to a third party, eliminating the need to purchase, configure and maintain those resources. With the incentive of lowered operational costs in software, hardware and human effort, many companies are considering the use of cloud services. Likewise, social networks have seen massive growth, with millions of Internet users actively participating across various social networking websites. Even corporations have begun using social networks as a means to market and reach their customers. This paper will survey the current issues in cloud computing and social networks and how these technologies are being used together.

Enterprise Service Bus: A Performance Evaluation

The flexibility offered by an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in enabling various applications to exchange data makes it a very important middleware layer that is responsible for transporting data in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The popularity of the ESB has given rise to a number of commercial off the shelf (COTS) products as well as open source ESBs. In this study, we evaluated three open source ESBs and compared them both qualitatively and quantitatively. The empirical results were statistically tested to determine the statistical significance of the results.

A Survey of the State of Cloud Security

Cloud computing has emerged as an important paradigm in computing today with the potential to offer scalable, fault tolerant services and reduce costs significantly. However, security concerns present significant barriers in its adoption industry wide. The multitenant nature of the cloud and the fact that data is stored in multiple locations compound these security concerns. Confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, availability and auditability are key aspects that need to be accounted for, when dealing with security. Guarantees of secure data and transactions from the service provider will enable more users to migrate to a cloud environment. Employing Intrusion Detection Systems, Cryptographic techniques and Computer Forensic Tools that recover deleted files and collect digital evidence of intruder activities are among some of the guarantees a trustful service provider can provide. This paper presents a survey on some of the common threats and associated risks on cloud platforms along with ways of tackling these threats. We also review data management and security model of some of the leading cloud service providers.