Identity and Access Management in Cloud Computing

Abstract

With Cloud computing, the latest addition in system architecture, consumers and companies can scale up to massive capacities in an instant without having any investment in new infrastructure or they can even shrink to a desktop within a second. But this service-oriented computing is becoming controversial due to the lack of privacy and security issues. In a recent survey conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC), 87.5% of the participants suggested security as the main reason for reluctance on the part of enterprise IT to aggressively adopt Cloud computing in future system deployments. This chapter discusses a possible solution for Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help enterprise IT organizations and Cloud providers to improve their services. Managing access control and governance within IAM, to meet today’s business needs in the Cloud environment, remains one of the major hurdles for enterprises’ adoption of Cloud services. Today’s aggressive adoption of immature Cloud computing services by enterprises creates extreme thrust to have a strong Cloud-based IAM system which provides support for business needs ranging from secure collaborations with global partners to secure access for global employees consuming sensitive information, from any location and using any device at any time. The motive of this chapter is to show readers a standard possible way to develop an IAM system. This idea can work as seed for someone or a development/research group to come up with a complete full solution.