Overcoming Barriers for Ubiquitous User- Centric Healthcare Services

The cloud model is rapidly evolving, with maturing intercloud architectures and progressive integration of sparse, geodistributed resources into large datacenters. The single-provider administrative barrier is also increasingly crossed by applications, allowing new verticals to benefit from the multicloud model. For instance, in home healthcare systems, transparent usage of resources from multiple providers enables "follow-me" scenarios, where healthcare services are accessible anywhere, anytime, with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. However, transparency might be at odds with security and jurisdictions, imposing restrictions on where data and applications might be stored and run. Existing intercloud approaches either disrupt application deployment mechanisms or compromise infrastructure homogeneity, making enforcing a uniform QoS level more complex, notably for protection. This article introduces Orchestration for beyond Intercloud Security (Orbits), an infrastructure-as-a-service-level architecture that enables flexible and legacy intercloud application deployment for mobile remote healing, while providing a homogeneous service abstraction across multiple clouds. The authors also present a work-in-progress prototype and several benchmarks to demonstrate the viability of the approach and highlight key implementation choices.