HCRBAC – An Access Control System for Collaborative Context-Aware HealthCare Services in Mauritius

HCRBAC – An Access Control System for Collaborative Context-Aware HealthCare Services in Mauritius

Oveeyen Moonian, Sudha Cheerkoot-Jalim, Soulakshmee D Nagowah, Kavi K Khedo, Razvi Doomun, Zarine Cadersaib

Abstract

Healthcare is an area dealing with an enormous amount of highly sensitive data being handled by a number of users. As a first step towards an e-health service, Mauritius requires the electronic management of patients’ data at its different healthcare institutions. Such data management should allow easy non-obtrusive, but secure, access to data by in house personnel of each healthcare institution, while also providing secure remote access to other institutions within the healthcare service as well as external bodies such as the police and insurance companies.. This paper presents HCRBAC (Healthcare Context-Aware Role-Based Access Control) a data access system for the Mauritian healthcare service, where data access within a healthcare institution is facilitated and controlled through the use of context-awareness, while remote access to data is provided in a secure way. A number of different existing access control mechanisms are first analyzed and a comparative study of these is performed. A combination of the different techniques is then used to provide efficient management of the data access system and allowing any healthcare institution to open up data access to other related institutions, without compromising confidentiality and integrity of data.

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Five things we have learned from Bill Gates

Whether or not you’re a fan of Bill Gates, it’s impossible to deny the role he has played in spreading computer technology across the planet during the past three decades. His retirement as a full-time Microsoft employee in June 2008 marked the end of an era — and it’s one worth looking back on. This Sanity Savers for I-T executives discusses the five of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the meteoric and often turbulent career of the world’s most famous IT professional.

Whether or not you’re a fan of Bill Gates, it’s impossible to deny the role he has played in spreading computer technology across the planet during the past three decades. His retirement as a full-time Microsoft employee in June 2008 marked the end of an era — and it’s one worth looking back on.

Five of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the meteoric, often turbulent career of the world’s most famous software engineer.

Number 5: Geeks can be businessmen, too

Before Bill Gates came along, computer programmers were mostly considered to be a necessary evil. They were stereotyped as misanthropic weirdos, and they were stuck away in dark corners of the back office. But then Gates became the most successful businessman on earth — if you judge business success by profits — and almost single-handedly transformed the term “geek” from an insult to a badge of honor.

Number four: You don’t have to be first to win

Gates and Microsoft rarely got to the party first with new technologies, but they were better at bringing their products to the masses than anyone else in the industry. Internet Explorer is the most famous example, but Microsoft Windows, Word, and Excel are also great examples. Microsoft was simply better at executing a business plan, and that’s why Microsoft software is now the industry standard. It didn’t hurt that Microsoft often had the most resources, but Gates and company showed over and over again that they knew how to best take advantage of those resources.

Number 3: Computing will spread everywhere

In the 1980s, when the computer was still mostly a novelty, Gates expressed his vision that there would one day be “a computer on every business desk and in every home.” That vision has nearly come true in the United States, and it’s likely to become a reality that will spread across the globe in the decades ahead.

Gates  vision of the computing experience has continued to inspire the industry in general as well as Microsoft’s product plans — from the smartphone to the Tablet PC to speech recognition to the touch-based interface.

Number 2: Arrogance breeds failure

In the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, the Bill Gates character says to Steve Ballmer, “Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking that they can’t lose.”

He was referring to IBM and the fact that it let Microsoft sneak in and steal its thunder in the launch of the PC. Ironically, a decade later, Microsoft’s own success and arrogance led to its anti-trust defeat to the U.S. government.

But Microsoft also remained on the lookout for the next small company that might do to it what it had done to IBM. Some of the most popular targets in its cross hairs: Apple, Netscape, Linux, and Google.

Number 1: Software matters

The one message that Bill Gates spent his career reiterating was that software matters. Gates and Microsoft always believed in the magic of software to create amazing digital experiences.

When Microsoft first launched in the 1970s, the computer business was all about the hardware. It was Gates and his vision of what people could do with computers that moved software to the center of the computing experience.

Bill Gates has had a tremendous influence on the direction and advancement of computer technology over the past 30 years. And although his era is coming to an end at Microsoft, we’ve discussed the five most important lessons that the technology industry has learned from his vision and accomplishments.

(Author Jason Hiner) e-mail : sanity@techrepublic.com.