Emerging technologies and their applications

¶ … Technologiies

Emerging Technologies

Scenario

Senior leadership of a medical center has just recently reviewed the plan for changes to the center's facilities. However, the medical center found out that the associated risks related to the new and emerging technologies had not been addressed. Thus, the Hospital's Chief Operating Officer (COO) has given a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) two weeks to deliver a quick evaluation of the risks as well as the planned expansion of the areas that may pose potential technology problems.

Security Issue at the Medical Center

The main security issue at the Medical Center is the protection of patient's identity and keeping patient's data anonymous as much as possible. In the contemporary IT environment, protection of the emerging technologies has become a challenge for many organizations since sophisticated hackers could used different strategies to steal patient's information from the central database, which include Social Security Number (SSN), credit card numbers, bank account information and other sensitive information and use them for monetary gains. Typically, many hackers are so sophisticated that they could bypass the firewall to use technique such as sniffing to steal patient's information from the database. (Stell, Sinnott, & Jiang 2009).

More importantly, the Medical Center has also been aiming to expand its technology to other emerging technologies such as the GPS (Global Positioning System) to track patients suffering from dementia. The GPS is an emerging technology that has been recently been used by many healthcare providers to track patients suffering from the acute diseases to deliver a quality health care. Thus, the Medical Center aims to use the GPS to track patients suffering from vascular dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and people with los of memory. (Michael, McNamee, & Michael, 2006). Despite the benefits that the Medical Center would derive from the GPS, there are still some security loopholes that could be exploited by unauthorized intruders. The GPS is using the wireless network devices, and wireless network could easily be exploited by unauthorized intruders. One of the major security concerns of GPS is its possibility to jamming and spoofing. A malicious interferer could use the spoofing to degrade the GPS or the jamming to interfere with the GPS transmission ( Ekambaram, & Ramchandran, 2007). The privacy of patients is another security issue with the use of GPS. The most significant ethical issue is that tracking of people with the GPS infringes on the rights of an individual.

The findings of the evaluation of the emerging technologies reveal that there are series of the security loopholes that an unauthorized user could use to exploit the database of the hospital in order to collect patient's sensitive information. Thus, the report provides the security protocols that the Medical Center could employ to protect its emerging technologies.

Method for Securing the Hospital's Emerging Technologies

One of the security issues within the Medical Center is to protect the patient's identity. One of the major strategies to protect the organizational emerging technologies is to use the multiple security devices. The firewall technology is one of the security devices that could be used to protect the medical center network devices. The firewall blocks all the outside interferers from accessing the company resources. The primary objective of a firewall is to control the outgoing and incoming traffic and analyze the data packets and determine which traffic should be allowed to pass through the network based on the predetermined rules. The firewall is very useful for medical center to monitor the data that pass through the central database. The strategy will be used to protect the unauthorized access to patient's information as well as protecting the emerging technologies of the Medical Centers.

Moreover, the hospital needs to implement a strict policy of keeping patient's data anonymous. The organization needs to enforce policy to define the category of person who could access the central database. The medical center should use authentication procedure using the digital certificate to ensure that only the authorized users could access the database.

Encryption is another security protocol to protect the data between different sites. The encryption is implemented using the public and private key-pairs. Implementation of the encryption is critical to ensure that an authorized person does not have access to the patient's information. Within the encryption technique, communications are done using the key-pairs. A major benefit that the medical center will enjoy from the encryption security protocol is that an authorized user will not be able to have access to the patients information because the information passing through the network will be changed to the unreadable texts and only the person with an asymmetric key will be able to convert the unreadable text to the readable form.