Role-Based Cloud Asset Access for Multi-Tenant Isolation
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Solution Overview
Problem
In multi-tenant cloud environments, ensuring secure isolation and access control among tenants is challenging, particularly when multiple customers share cloud assets like servers and applications.
Innovation Solution
A remote asset manager is employed to define roles for users based on their actions, associating credentials that allow secure access to cloud assets while maintaining isolation across tenants.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If multiple customers share cloud assets in a multi-tenant environment, then resource utilization and cost efficiency are improved, but security isolation and access control among tenants become challenging and deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments cloud asset access by implementing role-based access control where different tenant groups are assigned different roles (viewer, editor, administrator) with specific permission sets. This segmentation allows multiple tenants to share cloud assets simultaneously while maintaining security isolation through role-defined access boundaries, resolving the contradiction between resource utilization and security isolation.
2Reliability
If access control is implemented to maintain security isolation, then tenant data integrity is protected, but system complexity and management overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal role-based access control system where a single role assignment mechanism handles multiple access control requirements across different cloud assets and tenant groups. Instead of implementing separate access control systems for each asset, the universal role system provides multi-functional access management that protects tenant data integrity while reducing system complexity through consolidation.
3Reliability
If role-based access control is implemented for secure multi-tenant access, then security and isolation are improved, but access management flexibility and ease of operation may deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by pre-defining role templates with standardized permission sets before tenants need access to cloud assets. Common roles such as viewer, editor, and administrator are configured in advance with appropriate access rights, allowing rapid tenant onboarding and asset sharing without manual permission configuration for each tenant, thus maintaining security while improving ease of operation.
Data Source
AI summary
A cloud asset manager can securely provide multi-tenant access to remote assets while preserving isolation across tenants. The remote asset manager defines various roles for legitimate users of the remote asset manager. The roles are associated with credentials that provide access to the remote assets and/or information about the remote assets maintained by a service provider. And the users map to roles based on attempted actions that access the service provider. Thus, a user's requested action is attempted with credentials associated with a role that maps to the requested action.