cloudLink securely connects remote sites and third-party clinical systems in these sites to the Leafsprout secure network. It compresses (optionally) and encrypts (always) all the traffic from/to the site. This way the traffic can be securely passed between the site and the Leafsprout systems over the Internet. cloudLink runs on general-purpose hardware with high-end off-the-shelf CPUs and utilizes the CPU's built-in cryptographic instruction set to perform the encryption.
Leafsprout's cloudLink is an optional component and is not necessary when the site has modern high-end VPN equipment that can encrypt/decrypt at very high speeds (expensive!) so that large volumes of image data can be readily sent/received to/from the cloud.