In the cloud environment where the end users deliberately access multiple systems at a time, digital identity management services play a significant role in accrediting users, account provisioning and allowing user access to systems. The Identity Management services rationalize the interoperability across multiple domains based on identity attribute and semantic matching techniques.
If defined in simple terms, Identity management is a process where authenticated users may share there crucial identity details across the domains and access the identity information to get involved in the services of other digital identities.
Need of the Identity Management
In the rock solid emergence of cloud computing, user information is very vital for the companies in order to dispense them better services with complete privacy and security. Every time when users use the cloud service, they fill required sign up form to establish their identity and provide very sensitive data to provider. The process may leave a scope of data theft and misuse. Digital Identity management therefore allows users to have full control over the distributed information.
Logical components of Identity Management
A standard Identity management model works with four logical components namely The User, The User Agent, The Service Provider and finally The Identity provider. Wrapped up with these vital components an Identity Management model also ensures the compliance and other strict regulations important for an enterprise. All these components execute individual tasks during the process.
- The Service Provider:
- This component delivers certified identity attributes to users and takes control on the information to be shared
- The Identity Provider:
- This component allows access to the entire data and software resources over the internet
- The User Agent:
- These are the additional components that manage the information regarding the identity attributes used in identity attribute verification mode
Apart from above mentioned logical components, Identity Management is conceived around some well defined identity protocols. These protocols include:
- Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
- OpenID specification and
- InfoCard specification underlying Microsoft's Windows Cardspace
The process of Identity Management also takes charge of disbursement of safe and secure personally identifiable information to The Service Provider. The management process also executes the following tasks in close coordination with the The identity Provider. The task includes:
- Establishing identities that could be associated with personally identifiable information
- Describing identities and assign attributes to them
- Creating the log data for the identities
- Assigning expiration dates to the entities
Identity Management enhances the privacy and security in the cloud computing environment at the greater extent. Now users or organizations could have the better control over the information and data they share over the cloud environment since Identity Management imposes certain security and privacy laws to use, disclose and convey potential information in cloud computing.
is head of search marketing division Brainpulse. He covers core search marketing topics that matter the most for online businesses. With over 10 years of his experience in the vertical, he successfully manages marketing strategies for clients.
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