Trustworthy Processing of Healthcare Big Data in Hybrid Clouds

As we delve deeper into the "Digital Age," we're witnessing an explosive growth in the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value (the 5Vs) of data produced over the Internet. According to recent Cisco(1) and IBM2 reports, we now generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day, and this is set to explode to 40 yottabyes by 2020(3)-that is, 5,200 gigabytes for every person on the earth. As noted in previous "Blue Skies" columns, data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors are part of the big data landscape. 4,5 IoT comprises billions of Internet-connected devices (ICDs) or "things," each of which can sense, communicate, compute, and potentially actuate, and can have intelligence, multimodal interfaces, physical/virtual identities, and attributes. ICDs can be mobile devices, sensors, medical imaging devices, individual archives, social networks, smart cameras, body sensors, automobile cosimulations, or software logs. In a nutshell, a large volume of veracity data is generated at high velocity from a variety of sources.