Government regulation on cloud security may spur SaaS use in health care

"People are smart and are willing to participate but they need to feel they're not being abused," he said. This applies to all industries, not just health care, he said.

But government laws alone won't increase cloud computing use in the health-care space. The SaaS industry could do more to make its services intuitive to use and better suited to the needs of specific health researchers, like those who work in labs.

Giving people the ability to control their data in the cloud is a design issue, not a security problem, said Davis, who added that some user interface designs are clunky.

"There's still a significant percent of the population that aren't technologically literate and can't use these services," he said.

Cloud software developers may not realize that health researchers need applications that have audit functions to ensure that workers are complying with regulations, said Beyrouthy.