Patent ID: 8544068

Claim:
A method to manage access to protected resources hosted in a shared pool of configurable computing resources, comprising: registering a third party application that is permitted to access protected resources on behalf of end users via a delegated authorization protocol; for at least one end user associated with an organization, setting a permission that determines whether the third party application is permitted to access one or more protected resources associated with the end user, the permission associated with a policy; and responsive to a request by the third party application to access a protected resource, where the request is received via the delegated authorization protocol, using the permission to determine whether the third party application is permitted to access the protected resource by having a computing entity including a hardware element evaluate validity of one of: a credential associated with the request, and a token associated with the request, the credential uniquely identifying the third party application in the shared pool of configurable computing resources, the token uniquely identifying the end user in the shared pool of configurable computing resources; and applying the policy and returning a response to the request.