Cloud Identity and Access Management – A Model Proposal

Even if in a typical organization, where applications are deployed within the organization’s perimeter, the “trust boundary” is mostly static and is monitored and controlled by the IT department; with the adoption of cloud services, the organization’s trust boundary will become dynamic and will move beyond the control of IT. With cloud computing, the network, system, and application boundary of an organization will extend into the service provider domain. This loss of control continues to challenge the established trusted governance and control model, and, if not managed properly, will obstruct cloud service adoption within an organization. Based on both literature review and action research, the paper at hand is a synthesis for the results of a thorough review of the opinions and study attempts performed during the last years among Romanian and foreign companies, in order to find and formulate a consistent model for the integrated identity and access management, and, if possible, a cloud extension of the model. The paper is a part of a larger research performed by the author in the field of cloud computing and the neighboring technologies.