Access Control in Multi Tenant and Diverse Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing is a buzzword in field of information technology today. Despite a long list of advantages, the organizations are not switching to cloud at the pace expected due to a single major drawback, which is security. Researchers are putting their head and heart to analyze and solve security challenges faced by cloud computing environment. Access control to sensitive data is one such major challenge before cloud computing proponents.

Wikipedia defines access control as selective restriction of access to a place or other resource. The paper describes uniquefeatures ofcloud computing which make access control environment of cloud computing different from standard enterprise environment. Author tries to compare various access control techniques available and their potential applicability to cloud computing environment.