Assessment Criteria for Cloud Identity Management Systems

Cloud computing offers many benefits to the IT industry by making available the services and resources that helps them to proliferate or decrease their organizational resources automatically on demand. On the other hand, organizations are still uncertain about the security and privacy of their sensitive information (for instance the identity credentials) in the multitenant environment of the Cloud. Many security systems have been devised for the protection of resources in Cloud environments. Identity Management Systems, in this regard, play a vital role in ensuring effective user authentication, provisioning, de-provisioning and access control decisions. Many Cloud IDMSs have been proposed until now claiming to offer flexibility, agility and robustness. However, no comparative analysis of such Cloud based IDMSs has been performed so far, as to the best of our knowledge there exists no specific criteria against which one can evaluate an IDMS on Cloud. This paper proposes an assessment criterion for the evaluation of Cloud based IDMSs, comprising of potential security features that are positively imminent for the assessment of Cloud based IDMSs. Furthermore, analysis of Cloud IDMSs is presented based on the proposed assessment criteria. Potential research directions in the area of Cloud identity management and security are also discussed.