Management of Identity and Credentials in Mobile Cloud Environment

One of the significant objective of most enterprise information security measures is to ensure providing robust identity and access management (IAM) to its users. This encompasses systems straddling across the globe allowing the access of sensitive as well as confidential data of the enterprise at any point in time. With rapid mounting proliferation of mobile devices but with limited resources, cloud computing has emerged as an obvious predilection for performing resource intensive tasks over the cloud. To address the security issues, cloud service providers (CSPs) are coming up with new services such as Security as a Service (SecaaS). From our analysis of security threats and its measures, we feel that additional controls are required for Identity and Access Management for mobile cloud users. We have made some security recommendations along with best practices for consumers and service providers to consider ensuring robust information security including IAM for growing mobile users in cloud.