Biblio

More and more organizations are today using the cloud for their business as a quite convenient alternative to in-house solutions for storing, processing, and managing data. Cloud-based solutions are then permeating almost all aspects of business organizations, resulting appealing also for functions that, already in-house, may result sensitive or security critical, and whose enforcement in the cloud requires then particular care. In this paper, we provide an approach for securely relying on cloud-based services for the enforcement of Internal Controls and Audit (ICA) functions for corporate governance. Our approach is based on the use of selective encryption and of tags to provide a level of self-protection to data and for enabling only authorized parties to access data and perform operations on them, providing privacy and integrity guarantees, as well as accountability and non-repudiation.

Cloud technologies are increasingly important for IT department for allowing them to concentrate on strategy as opposed to maintaining data centers; the biggest advantages of the cloud is the ability to share computing resources between multiple providers, especially hybrid clouds, in overcoming infrastructure limitations. User identity federation is considered as the second major risk in the cloud, and since business organizations use multiple cloud service providers, IT department faces a range of constraints. Multiple attempts to solve this problem have been suggested like federated Identity, which has a number of advantages, despite it suffering from challenges that are common in new technologies. The following paper tackles federated identity, its components, advantages, disadvantages, and then proposes a number of useful scenarios to manage identity in hybrid clouds infrastructure.