Cloud computing and its flexible business model of consuming IT resources such as computing power or data storage just on demand promises a lot of benefits and advantages. These advantages also the public sector and governments can benefit from. Hence, cloud computing is already on the agenda of governmental policy and decision makers. Additionally, various countries have already adapted their IT strategies to support cloud computing for their governmental and public services. However, within the public sector the private cloud model currently constitutes the dominant deployed approach. Although this model offers high control it does not take full advantage of the economic benefits of cloud computing. Therefore, based on an evaluation of different cloud models and a comparison of different national cloud computing strategies the authors argue and show that public clouds are worth more than a peek for e-Government because of their tremendous cost savings potential.
Reliable and secure user identification and authentication are key enablers for regulating access to protected online services. Since cloud computing gains more and more importance, identification and authentication in and across clouds play an increasing role in this domain too. Currently, existing web identity management models are often just mapped to the cloud domain. Besides, within recent years several cloud identity management models such as the cloud identity brokermodel have emerged. In the aforementioned model, an identity broker in the cloud acts as hub between various service and identity providers. While this seems to be a promising approach for adopting identity management in cloud computing, still some problems can be identified. A notable issue is the dependency of users and service providers on the same central broker for identification and authentication processes. Additionally, letting an identity broker store or process sensitive data such as identity information in the cloud brings up new issues, in particular with respect to user's privacy. To overcome these problems, we propose a new cloud identity management model based on the federation between different cloud identity brokers. Thereby, users and service providers can select their favorite cloud identity broker without being dependent on one and the same broker. Moreover, it enhances user's privacy by the use of appropriate cryptographic mechanisms and in particular proxy re-encryption. Besides introducing the model we also provide a proof of concept implementation thereof.
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