UACS: Towards unified access control services

Due to the growing concerns in access management techniques and the numerous access controls that have been proposed in the recent years, as well as because of the emerging cloud computing era, there is an increasing interest in advanced and secure access control services that will improve security and compliance. In this paper, we present the Unified Access Control Services (UACS) framework for accessing protected resources based on policy-driven decisions and we analyze the integration of the authentication and authorization modules with the access control policies. The proposed integration ensures an enhanced secure access to cloud or on-premises resources. We propose policy-driven access controls and validation rules to achieve increased automation, ensure compliance and deliver better access control service efficiency.