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arguments for cloud computing in the public
segment and has shown the role of effective
governance and strong leadership for successful
rollout. Their work fosters openness and includes
local innovators and entrepreneurs. Buyya et al.
(2008) propose Cloud Computing as the 5
th
utility
after water, electricity, gas and telephony and has
put forth an architecture for dynamic provisioning of
cloud services. Most of the work focuses on the
applicability of cloud computing as a whole with its
novel features and how the government can benefit
from it. Lately, the government in developing
countries like India are waking up to the digital
revolution. Competitive technology with adequate
support from the government has made inroads for
e-Governance. Sadly, the health department is yet to
catch up with the pace of such newer trends and
there hasn’t been much works in this area that can
reap such benefits. Our work tried to identify the
roadblocks and makes a strong case for Cloud
Computing adoption for HIMS.
3 CLOUD COMPUTING
Cloud Computing is an extension of the idea of
utility-computing where the necessary resources like
computing, memory and data-storage are all handled
in the “Cloud”. In simpler words, all the vital
resources are being managed by some third-party
vendors who are specialized in handling the data and
computing centres. Typically such data centres
comprise a collection of machines that are pre-
configured and provisioned dynamically. The
machine allocation may take place by explicit user
request or implicitly when the provisioned capacity
is insufficient to meet the computing requirements.
The user accesses the resources through some
dedicated network or over the public network like
the internet and is generally billed to the extent of
his usage by the vendor. For enterprises, moving to
the cloud means doing away with the capital
expenditure of hardware, software and support staff
for the desired service. Instead, the services are
available on demand and generally backed by some
SLA (service level agreements) that acts as a
binding contract for the provider to deploy necessary
services as agreed. Some prominent players in this
arena are Amazon, Salesforce.com, Google and
Microsoft.
Cloud computing provides the following
advantages over traditional computing models of the
enterprise:
i. Significant reduction in initial setup costs:
This is achieved by converting the in-house
IT capital expense to operating expenses
ii. Increased Flexibility: On demand solutions
and lesser implementation times with
support from a large ecosystem of providers.
iii. Ubiquitous Access: Services can be accessed
over the internet
iv. Elastic Scalability: Capacity alteration as per
changing needs.
v. Pay-per-use: Payment only for the capacity
utilized. EOS (economies of scale) reduces
the cost of usage.
vi. Easy to Deploy: The user doesn’t need to
purchase hardware or software. All a user
needs is a compatible web-browser.
vii. Auto-upgrade: Since the system is managed
centrally, all updates and policy
requirements can be enforced at all locations
simultaneously
viii. Reliable Service Quality: Large storage and
computing achieved through distributed
fault-tolerant systems
ix. Focus on Core Competence: Traditional
organizations need to have a dedicated IT
team and sometimes there is a conflict of
interest during system upgrades. With cloud
computing, the organization can focus on its
core-competence while leaving the chores of
the system to the service provider.
x. Collaboration: Since application and data are
accessible from anywhere, it encourages
collaboration
xi. Disaster Recover Capabilities: Since the data
and the application are replicated at multiple
locations, in the event of any disaster or
natural calamity, business resume can be fast
xii. Business Migration and Continuity: As
business expands, the cloud computing
model can enable rapid capacity additions.
New business units can start functioning
immediately without needing to wait for
system deployment and configurations.
4 HEALTH INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN
INDIA – EARLIER STUDIES
A survey conducted by C-DAC (Bedi et al. 2010)
revealed that on average, there is 1 bed for every
2315 people in India. Some states like Assam in the
country has only 1 bed per 9293 people. Such high
patient/bed ratio invariably puts a pressure on the
infrastructure resulting in crippling of the entire
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