Identity Management Practices and Concerns in Enterprise Cloud Infrastructures

This paper reviews both scholarly and trade literature for contribution into a greater body of knowledge in identity management (IdM) practices and applications in cloud infrastructures. Identity management is a lateral iteration in the field of information security. In this paper classical and emergent identity management views are defined along with practices and applications. The benefits and challenges in identity management are surfaced, the cloud environment is defined, and the case is made for security within the environment and how identity management facilitates greater control over the access and confidentiality of user and enterprise data both stored and transmitted. Advances in identity management, cloud systems, and private and public key cryptosystems are also explored with a specific review of the three main IdM cloud practices: OpenID, security assertion markup language (SAML) and Microsoft Infocard. Keywords-identity management; security; cloud; OpenID, SAML, Infocard