## 2 e-Health Cloud Opportunities  
Cloud computing is an emerging commercial model that allows organizations to eliminate the need to maintain in-house high-cost hardware, software, and network infrastructures. It also reduces or even eliminates the high-cost of recruiting technical professionals to support and operate the in-house infrastructures and IT solutions. Through the use of virtualization and resource time-sharing, the Cloud offers diverse IT solutions as on-demand services for different organizational needs. It is designed to be flexible and scalable thus allowing clients to increase the capacities of their existing system without investing in new infrastructure components. While CC can significantly reduce IT costs and complexities, it enhances resources utilization and service delivery [20]. Different types of organizations can benefit from CC such as governmental organizations, financial enterprises, online entertainment companies, and healthcare providers. The special type of CC that is used for improving patient care is called e-Health Cloud and it provides opportunities to solve some of the current limitations facing HITsolutions [21]. Before discussing the opportunities of the e-Health Cloud, we will explore the current limitations of current e-health systems, some of which are discussed in [22]:  
**(a) High cost of implementing and maintaining HIT:** the cost of HIT requires investments in software, hardware, technical infrastructure, IT professionals, and training. This can result in a considerable cost to healthcare organizations in particular for the medium and small sized entities. HIT implementations can be time consuming and stressful for the already stressed healthcare organizations due to demands on healthcare professionals who have to share project responsibilities with their patient care duties. Finally, HIT requires dedicated teams and proper funding to handle day to day management and maintenance. **(b) Fragmentation of HIT and insufficient exchange of patient data:** HIT in most cases exists as separate small clinical or administrative systems within different departments of the healthcare provider's organization. Therefore, the patients' data exist in a dispersed state where certain portions of this data are restricted within separate departmental systems, certain clinics or areas of the healthcare organization. Such dispersed pockets of data make it challenging to bring information together and share it across the organization or across different healthcare providers. **(c) Lack of regulations/laws mandating the use and protection of electronic health care data capture and communication:** currently, there are no well established laws or regulations mandating the electronic capture of patient data in addition to law covering issues of protection and security of this data. For example, there is no general law protecting the privacy of patients and the interchanges of their medical data between countries [23]. The data protection standards and regulations are at different levels across countries; for example, the directive on privacy and electronic communications in Europe [24] protects the personal information of patients while the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and Subtitle D of the HIT for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in the United State [25] enforces privacy and security standards for organizations covered by HIPPA. **(d) Lack of e-Health Cloud design and development standards:** There are no well established standards available for healthcare providers to use to design and build their systems. This would include definitions of data types, forms and at times frequency of data capture in addition to defining how the data is obtained, stored, used and protected. One of the biggest challenges in the area of e-health standardization is the production of multitudinous e-health standards (e.g., DICOM, ISO/TC 215, HL7, _etc._) developed by numerous standardization bodies (e.g., NEMA, ISO, _etc._).