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Experimental overview
The proposed explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)-enabled secure cloud data migration protocol was evaluated using a synthetic healthcare dataset comprising approximately 20 million electronic health record (EHR) records distributed across 28 relational database tables, totaling 10 GB. The experiments were conducted in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment using Amazon RDS PostgreSQL 16, private Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking, TLS 1.3 encrypted communication, and centralized monitoring services. Ten independent migration experiments were performed under identical hardware, software, network, and workload conditions to ensure reproducibility and minimize experimental bias. All reported performance values represented the mean of the ten experimental runs. Statistical significance was evaluated using paired Student's t-tests after verification of normality using the Shapiro-Wilk test (p < 0.05).
Results of dataset preparation and validation
The synthetic healthcare dataset was successfully generated according to the protocol specifications. Data validation confirmed the successful generation of approximately 20,000,000 patient-related records distributed across 28 relational tables, including patient demographics, clinical encounters, diagnoses, laboratory reports, medications, imaging metadata, billing information, and physician records. Primary-key uniqueness, foreign-key relationships, and referential integrity constraints were successfully verified before migration. Approximately 5% of the data values were intentionally left missing to simulate realistic electronic health record databases and were subsequently processed during data cleaning. Dataset quality assessment demonstrated successful schema validation, acceptable value ranges, and complete referential integrity. The cumulative dataset validation error remained below 0.1%, indicating that the generated dataset was suitable for secure migration experiments, as shown in Table 1.
Results of system architecture deployment
The secure migration architecture was successfully deployed and validated before execution of the migration workflow. All cloud resources are operated within an isolated AWS Virtual Private Cloud using private subnets, security groups, and identity-based access policies. Database communications were protected using TLS 1.3 encryption, and migration credentials were dynamically generated according to the temporal least-privilege policy. Authentication logs, migration logs, database events, network events, and security audit logs were continuously collected through Amazon CloudWatch. Throughout all experimental runs, communications occurred exclusively through private network endpoints, and no publicly accessible database services were detected. Continuous monitoring demonstrated stable communication among all migration components without unexpected service interruptions or authentication failures, as shown in Figure 2.
Results of the secure migration workflow
Threat modeling
The predefined threat model successfully identified credential theft, insider attacks, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, schema tampering, and privilege-escalation scenarios. The implemented security controls effectively mitigated all identified threats before migration execution, as summarized in Table 2.
Database schema transfer
Database schema migration was successfully completed in all experimental runs. All relational tables, indexes, stored procedures, constraints, metadata, primary keys, and foreign keys were transferred without structural inconsistencies or schema drift.
Secure data migration
The migration process was completed successfully in all ten experimental runs without workflow interruptions or transaction failures. Secure data transfer was maintained throughout the migration process using encrypted communication channels over private network endpoints.
Migration validation
Post-migration validation confirmed complete consistency between the source and target databases. SHA-256 checksum verification produced 100% matching across all migrated tables, demonstrating that no data corruption occurred during transmission. Record-count validation confirmed successful migration of all 20 million records without loss, duplication, or truncation. Validation of primary keys, foreign keys, indexes, schema definitions, and database constraints confirmed complete preservation of database integrity. No schema drift, rollback events, transaction failures, or migration inconsistencies were observed throughout the evaluation period. Quantification of integrity results is given in Table 9.
| Validation Metric | Observed Result | Acceptance Criterion | Status |
| Total healthcare records migrated | 20,000,000 | 20,000,000 | Passed |
| Relational database tables migrated | 28 | 28 | Passed |
| Dataset size migrated | 10 GB | 10 GB | Passed |
| SHA-256 checksum verification | 100% match | 100% match | Passed |
| Record-count consistency | 100% | 100% | Passed |
| Schema validation | All tables validated | No schema errors | Passed |
| Primary-key integrity | Verified | No violations | Passed |
| Foreign-key integrity | Verified | No violations | Passed |
| Data corruption rate | 0% | 0% | Passed |
| Schema drift | Not observed | None | Passed |
| Rollback events | 0 | 0 | Passed |
| Migration completion rate | 100% | 100% | Passed |
Table 9: Data integrity validation results after secure database migration. It presents the main integrity verification metrics on the quantitative side. These include checking that the SHA-256 hash sums matched, the count of records was consistent, the schema was validated, key-constraint preservation, migration was completed, rollback events, and overall migration success of ten separate migration experiments.
Table 9 summarizes the quantitative data integrity validation results obtained after secure cloud data migration. The results demonstrated that all migration acceptance criteria were satisfied across the ten independent experimental runs.
Post-migration hardening
Temporal least-privilege credential management substantially improved credential security compared with the conventional migration framework. The average credential lifetime decreased from 24.7 ± 1.3 h in the baseline environment to 0.42 ± 0.18 h in the proposed framework, representing a 98.3% reduction in credential exposure duration. Temporary credentials were revoked immediately after migration completion, and no unauthorized authentication attempts using expired credentials were detected during any experimental run. Removing long-lived credentials reduced the potential attack surface while maintaining uninterrupted migration performance, as shown in Figure 3.
Results of explainable AI monitoring
Security feature extraction
Security telemetry was successfully collected from database servers, authentication services, application servers, and network monitoring systems. Feature extraction generated normalized measurements of access frequency, failed login count, IP address changes, session duration, and data transfer volume for anomaly detection, as described in Table 3.
Anomaly detection model performance
The isolation Forest model demonstrated robust anomaly-detection performance across 10 independent experiments. The average accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) were 94.6 ± 1.3%, 92.7 ± 1.5%, 93.1 ± 1.6%, 92.9 ± 1.4%, and 0.97 ± 0.01, respectively. The model configuration followed the parameters summarized in Table 4.
Security anomaly detection
The proposed monitoring framework reduced the average incident detection time from more than 24 h in the baseline environment to approximately 15 min. False-positive detections remained below 3%, and no critical migration failures remained undetected throughout the evaluation period. Representative anomaly detection outputs are presented in Figure 4.
Explainability analysis
SHAP TreeExplainer generated interpretable feature-attribution results for all detected anomalies. A background dataset containing 1,000 representative training samples was used to calculate SHAP values. Global explanation analysis consistently identified failed login count, data transfer volume, IP address changes, session duration, and access frequency as the most influential features contributing to anomaly predictions. Repeated explainability analysis across ten experimental runs produced nearly identical feature rankings, demonstrating stable model interpretation. Local SHAP explanations further identified the principal factors contributing to individual anomaly predictions, thereby improving transparency of the security monitoring process. Representative explainability outputs are shown in Figure 5, while the corresponding feature importance rankings are summarized in Table 5.
Results of performance evaluation
Comparison with the baseline migration framework demonstrated substantial improvements across multiple security metrics. Credential exposure duration decreased by 98.3%, anomaly detection accuracy improved from 72.4 ± 2.1% to 94.6 ± 1.3%, and publicly accessible migration endpoints decreased from six to zero. The average incident detection time was markedly reduced while complete migration integrity was maintained throughout the evaluation. Although additional security controls increased migration latency by 11.2 ± 2.9%, the observed increase remained below the predefined acceptance threshold of 15%, indicating that security improvements were achieved with minimal impact on migration efficiency. Representative performance evaluation results are presented in Figure 6, and the quantitative comparison between the baseline and proposed frameworks is summarized in Table 7.
Statistical validation and reproducibility
Statistical analysis demonstrated significant improvements in credential exposure duration, anomaly detection accuracy, incident detection time, and migration latency between the baseline and proposed frameworks (paired Student's t-test, p < 0.05). The calculated 95% confidence intervals showed low variability across the 10 independent experimental runs, confirming the reproducibility and stability of the proposed protocol. Detailed results of each experiment are given in Table 10.
| Experimental Run | Credential Exposure Duration (h) | Anomaly Detection Accuracy (%) | Migration Latency (min) | SHA-256 Validation | Migration Status |
| Run 1 | 0.45 | 94.3 | 96.8 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 2 | 0.41 | 95 | 98.2 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 3 | 0.39 | 94.7 | 95.9 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 4 | 0.44 | 94.5 | 97.6 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 5 | 0.43 | 94.8 | 96.9 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 6 | 0.4 | 94.2 | 98.5 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 7 | 0.42 | 95.1 | 97.2 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 8 | 0.38 | 94.6 | 96.7 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 9 | 0.43 | 94.9 | 97.8 | Passed | Successful |
| Run 10 | 0.41 | 94.5 | 97 | Passed | Successful |
| Mean ± SD | 0.42 ± 0.02 | 94.66 ± 0.29 | 97.26 ± 0.80 | 100% Passed | 10/10 Successful |
Table 10: Experimental reproducibility over ten separate migration runs. The table presents a summary of the time interval during which a credential was exposed, the precision of detecting anomalies, the delay of a migration, the status of the SHA-256 validation, and the success of the migration for each experimental run, thus demonstrating the stability and reproducibility of the proposed secure cloud migration framework under the same experimental conditions.
Table 10 presents the detailed results of all ten independent experimental runs, demonstrating the consistency, stability, and reproducibility of the proposed secure cloud migration protocol under identical experimental conditions.
The experimental evaluation demonstrated that integration of zero-trust security, temporal least-privilege access control, continuous anomaly monitoring, and SHAP-based explainability improved migration security while maintaining complete database integrity and acceptable migration performance. Because the experiments were conducted using a synthetic healthcare dataset within a controlled cloud environment, these findings should be interpreted within the evaluated experimental configuration. Additional validation using operational healthcare infrastructures, real clinical datasets, and multi-institutional cloud environments will be required before generalizing the protocol for routine deployment in production healthcare systems.