This paper is presented as part of a collaborative research project to develop a complex Cloud Service Delivery Platform (CSDP). The aim of the project is to develop a new disruptive approach for service provision to enable the creation of new value chains via Cloud Technology. This paper is primarily concerned with designing and implementing a novel Multi-tenancy architecture which supports a proposed hybrid authentication mechanism for greater resource optimization with enhanced security. The contribution of this paper is three-fold. First, it provides the reader with a concise classification of security concerns together with some developed concepts namely; Security-Aware cloud platform and a Cloud Adoption Model. Second, it proposes a hybrid authentication approach, coupling Single-Sign-On (SSO) with multi-factor authentication to enable improved security for Cloud federated access. Third, is to design and implement an integrated architecture enabling this hybrid authentication solution in a multi-tenancy setting. To the best of the authors knowledge, this work has not been attempted before and is unprecedented.
