Biblio

The promise of access to contextual expertise, advanced security tools and an increase in staff augmentation coupled with reduced computing costs has indisputably made cloud computing a computing platform of choice, so enticing that many organizations had to migrate some if not all their services to the cloud. Identity-management-as-a-service (IdMaaS), however, is still struggling to mature due to lack of trust. Lack of trust arises from losing control over the identity information (user credentials), identity management system as well as the underlying infrastructure, raising a fear of loss of confidentiality, integrity and availability of both the identities and the identity management system. This paper recognizes the need for a trust framework comprising of both the operational and technical Frameworks as a holistic approach towards enhancing trust in IdMaaS. To this end however, only the operational Framework will form the core of this paper. The success of IdMaaS will add to the suite of other matured identity management technologies, spoiling the would-be identity service consumers with a wide choice of identity management paradigms to pick from, at the same time opening entrepreneurial opportunities to cloud players.