Secure communications for PACS in a cloud environment

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) have been traditionally constrained to the premises of the healthcare provider. This has limited the availability of these systems in many parts of the world and mandated major costs in infrastructure for those who employ them. Public cloud services could be a solution that eases the cost of ownership and provide greater flexibility for PACS implementations. Moving these systems to the public cloud requires that an authentication and encryption policy for communications is established within the PACS environment. This paper investigated an implementation which uses Transport Layer Security for communications between a cloud-based PACS server and client.