## 1 Introduction  
Planning to utilize the latest technologies in the healthcare industry is an important strategy for many healthcare organizations to enhance healthcare services and reduce operations costs [1; 2; 3]. There is a high increase in the demand on healthcare services while the shortages in qualified healthcare professionals such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists form one of the toughest challenges confronting healthcare providers [4; 5]. In addition, diseases are becoming more complex and new advancements in technology and research have facilitated the emergence of new and more effective diagnoses and treatment techniques [6]. As a result the logistics behind managing such operations has become more complex and very costly. Furthermore, competition among the healthcare industry has risen [7]. Different healthcare organizations provide different types of services to fit the needs of diverse economic categories and disease levels. The marketplace is very competitive while pressure from regulatory authorities forces weak and non-performing hospitals out of business very quickly. In preserving the wellbeing of humans, any reduction in the numbers of healthcare providers or services cannot be tolerated. HIT has evolved over the years from departmental solutions to encompass larger solutions at the enterprise level, and from stand alone systems that provide limited and localized solutions to more interconnected ones that provide comprehensive and integrated solutions [8]. The complexity of HIT has also evolved from there being passive and reactive systems to now becoming more interactive and proactive with more focus on the quality of care [9; 10; 11; 12]. HIT also benefited from the advancements in technology such as database systems, full redundancy for mission critical systems, as well as the recently emerging Cloud Computing (CC) systems to provide efficient and reliable solutions to support health services. According to [PERSON] _et al._[13], CC can be defined as \"A computing paradigm which is a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically scalable, managing, computing, power storage platforms and services for on demand delivery over the Internet.\" Emanating from this fact, CC represents the new leading edge for HIT. Utilizing CC for HIT introduces many opportunities to healthcare service delivery [14]. Cloud owners maintain computing facilities, data storage, and software that facilitate the daily routines and procedures of healthcare operations in a flexible and scalable way through effective service-level-agreements (SLAs) _i.e._, \"pay as you use\" contracts. Some healthcare providers have found an opportunity to shift the burden of managing and maintaining complex HIT to the Cloud or more appropriately to the Cloud service providers [15; 16]. Thus, in addition to removing the operational load off the shoulders of the healthcare providers, it also significantly reduces the operational and maintenance costs. CC also opened a window of opportunity for healthcare providers to share part of their data with other stakeholders such as government agencies, health research institutes, authorized private companies such as insurance companies and other hospitals. Sharing patients' data serves different purposes that contribute to improve the quality of healthcare services. Yet this sharing needs to have strict regulations on who is sharing the data and how well the privacy of the patients is maintained. However, according to [PERSON] _et al._[17], when dealing with privacy and sharing information several threats are involved. The top threats include social functions where, although users can choose to be anonymous, they could easily and involuntarily expose their identity or personal information. Another threat is the selling of medical information as some personal information may not be obvious enough to be excluded before the sale. In addition users may not find an explicit list of what was distributed or sold and cannot figure out what information about them was included.