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.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was asked on Friday to weigh potential privacy and security risks before allowing the City of Los Angeles to ditch Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Novell (NSDQ: NOVL) for Google (NSDQ: GOOG).

In a letter to the Mayor, Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, urges "a thorough analysis and risk assessment of all privacy and other confidentiality impacts that may occur" if the City of Los Angeles goes through with its proposal to replace its e-mail system and office applications with Google Apps.

The White House is still in the early stages of developing a digital identity management strategy, according to one of President Obama's cybersecurity advisors.

In a report on cybersecurity policy issued in May, the White House said that creating "an identity management vision that addresses privacy and civil liberties" would be an action item in the President's cybersecurity strategy. Over the long term, the government might implement an an "array" of opt-in, interoperable identity management systems for the public, according to the report.