Sarcouncil Journal of Engineering and Computer Sciences

Abstract: Public health informatics systems are also trending towards distributed architectures, in particular, cloud-based architectures, for supporting surveillance, analytics, reports, and decisions. The sensitivity of health data, volume of ingestion, and need for near real-time analytics pose significant architectural challenges, especially for security, privacy, and governance. As much as cloud technologies are being used, previous research lacks sufficient contributions in terms of security, architectural approaches, and domain applications. The primary innovation of this research is the formulation of a literature-informed conceptual reference architecture for secure cloud-native public health informatics services based on comparative case studies and qualitative architectural evaluation. Based on an extensive review of literature produced between 2020 and 2025, the paper assembles critical security, architectural, and operation-related requirements by integrating the principles of zero trust security models, privacy-preserving data processing, secure API interoperability, and container-orchestrated microservices. The analysis identifies some of the persistent risks in modern public health data systems, including gaps in identity and access management, cloud misconfigurations, interoperability limitations, and the increased threat of ransomware that specifically targets healthcare infrastructure. It then proposes a reference architecture based on a federated cloud deployment model informed by encryption, identity federation, attestation mechanisms, immutable logging, and policy-driven automation. Cloud-native approaches, combined with strong governance, continuous monitoring, and standardized data exchange protocols, facilitate system resilience and adaptability and improve regulatory compliance. Recommendations are made on policy development, system design, and areas of future research through which to strengthen global public health informatics infrastructure.