Identity management and cloud computing in the automotive industry: first empirical results from a quantitative survey

Abstract

The automotive industry forms a complex network of original equipment manufacturers and suppliers that requires a high level of cooperation in development projects. Therefore, an efficient identity management system is needed to control access to exchanged data and collaboratively used IT-solutions supporting the development process. One of the main requirements for this system is the reliable authentication of engineers of various companies with different credentials. The SkIDentity-Project, which aims at building trusted identities for the cloud, addresses this scenario. In this context, we carried out a quantitative survey to investigate the diffusion and adoption of cloud computing and identity management technologies. First results are presented in this paper and show that although cloud computing is used by approximately half of the companies in the sample, we noticed that with an increasing number of involved parties, the trust in this technology drops significantly. Regarding identity management systems, we found a similar effect. Company-wide identity management systems are used by the majority of the companies but cross-company solutions are not adopted to this extent. Further scrutiny identified a lack of motivation as one of the main reasons for the low diffusion of this technology.