Privacy concerns in outsourced cloud databases have become more and more important recentlyand many efficient and scalable query processing methods over encrypted data have been proposed.However, there is very limited work on how to securely process top-k ranking queries over encrypteddatabases in the cloud. In this paper, we focus exactly on this problem: secure and efficient proce...

Information technology (IT) service availability is at the core of customer satisfaction and business success for today’s organisations. Many medium‐ to large‐size organisations outsource part of their IT services to external providers, with service‐level agreements describing the agreed availability of outsourced service components. Availability management of partially outsourced IT services i...

Background and Aim: The District Health Network is based on the principles of equity, appropriate technology, inter-sectoral collaboration and public participation. Measuring patient satisfaction is one of the basic criteria in determining the quality of care services. The purpose of this study was to compare the level of satisfaction of service recipients between government and non-government ...

Cloud services are blooming recently. They provide a convenient way for data accessing, sharing, and processing. A key ingredient for successful cloud services is to control data access while considering the specific features of cloud services. The specific features include great quantity of outsourced data, large number of users, honest-but-curious cloud servers, frequently changed user set, d...

Outsourced computations enable more efficient solutions towards practical problems that require major computations. Nevertheless, users’ privacy remains as a major challenge, as the service provider can access users’ data freely. It has been shown that fully homomorphic encryption schemes might be the perfect solution, as it allows one party to process users’ data homomorphically, without the n...

Even though cloud computing provides many intrinsic benefits (e.g., cost savings, availability, scalability, etc.), privacy concerns related to the lack of control over the storage and management of the outsourced (confidential) data still prevent many customers from migrating to the cloud. In this respect, several privacy-protection mechanisms based on a prior encryption of the data to be outs...

The proliferation of web-based applications and information systems, and recent trends such as cloud computing and outsourced data management, have increased the exposure of data and made security more difficult. In this paper we briefly discuss open issues, such as data protection from insider threat and how to reconcile security and privacy, and outline research directions.