My Sun Microsystems colleague Dave Edstrom asked me recently to prepare a webinar entitled “Identity Management in 2010: Trends and Predictions” and present it on the weekly “Software Technical Roundtable” he co-hosts for Sun Microsystems employees and partners. 

The General Services Administration plans to launch an online storefront that agencies can use to purchase computing services that are stored and maintained by third-party providers, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said on Wednesday.

Two major identity management companies are forging ahead with products designed to satisfy what a cloud-computing consortium calls one of the trickiest problems preventing secure and automated connections between internal IT infrastructures and external service providers: identity and authentication.

Last week at The Burton Group's Catalyst Conference, Novell demonstrated a pre-release version of its Cloud Security Service, designed to synchronize login and authentication data between external clouds and internal systems without exposing internal security data.

Many entrepreneurs today have their heads in the clouds. They’re either
outsourcing most of their network infrastructure to a provider such as
Amazon Web Services or are building out such infrastructures to
capitalize on the incredible momentum around cloud computing. I have no
doubt that this is The Next Big Thing in computing, but sometimes I get
a little tired of the noise. Cloud computing could become as ubiquitous
as personal computing, networked campuses or other big innovations in
the way we work, but it’s not there yet.

In the last few years, cloud computing has grown from being a promising business concept to one of the fastest growing segments of the IT industry.
Now, recession-hit companies are increasingly realising that simply by
tapping into the cloud they can gain fast access to best-of-breed
business applications or drastically boost their infrastructure
resources, all at negligible cost.