USER CENTRIC APPROACH TO IDENTITY MANAGEMENT IN CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT: AN EMPIRICALLY TESTED FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Most of the commercial identity management models have focused on the perspective of service providers and given a preference to the challenges faced by the service providers. However, with the growing number of concerns, an identity management system with strong focus on the user’s concerns is required. A User Centric Approach for Identity Management (UCAId) for Cloud Computing in SaaS Environment has been presented in this paper. The proposed UCAId model considers user at the central position to improve their experience and increase adaptability of the cloud. Comprehensive literature review has been carried out to identify the most important parameters of the User Centric Identity management. Provisioning, privacy, security, scalability and trust have been identified as the five most parameters and further the model presents these parameters built-up on the strength of eight components each, individually. The model has been empirically tested to see its user adoption on a set Indian users with varied demographics. Data has been collected using a structured questionnaire and Principal Component Analysis has been used to analyze this primary data.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vikas Kumar

Dr. Vikas Kumar received M Sc. in Electronics from Kurukshetra University, Haryana, India. This was followed by MSc in Computer Science and further PhD from the same university. He also did his MBA in the area of Information Systems and Operations Management. His PhD work was in collaboration with CEERI, Pilani and he has worked in a number of ISRO sponsored projects. He is a life member of Indian Science Congress Association, Computer Society of India, IETE, ICEIE, IPA, VEDA, IVS and Magnetic Society of India. Dr. Kumar has designed and conducted number of training programs for the corporate sector and is a trainer for a number of Govt of India departments. Along with 15 books, He has more than 120 research papers to his credit in various national and international conferences and journals. He was the Editor of International Quarterly Refereed Journal “Asia-Pacific Business Review” during June 2007-June 2009. Presently, Dr. Kumar is serving at Central University of Haryana and visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore and University of Northern Iowa, USA. The specific areas of his interest include Business Intelligence, e-Business, Social Media Analytics and Web Analytics.

Aashish Bhardwaj

Dr. Aashish Bhardwaj is working as Head of Department (Computer Science and Engineering) at Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He is recipient of NPTEL Star in the categories of NPTEL Believers and NPTEL Enthusiasts. He is a life member of Indian National Science Congress Association, Indian Society for Technical Education, Fellow of Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers, and Computer Society of India. He has published research papers in IGI Global journals (IJSSMET, IJSDS), Inderscience journals (IJCC), IIJCS, IJRECE, IJCMS, etc. He has published papers in international conferences such as IPMC- 2006 at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, IEEE Conference ICCIT- 2011 at Dhaka, M4D-2012 at New Delhi, ICPE-2008 at New Delhi, and Indian Science Congress 93rd at Hyderabad and 101st at Jammu. He is an IBM-Certified Deployment Professional Tivoli Directory Server V6.1, Rational Functional Tester for Java, and DB2 9 Fundamentals and Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software 6.0.