As more organisations turn to the cloud, the need for an effective set of industry standards is becoming ever more pressing.

There is a clear divide between those who argue for implementation of cloud standards and those who argue against. At the heart of this debate is a clear need to balance the benefits of having a standard with the call for a sustained pace of innovation.

Increasingly complex business relationships are forcing companies to give outsiders greater access to internal systems. According to this year's Global Information Security Survey, this presents a security problem.

Authorities are investigating whether New Zealand should follow California's lead and make it a criminal offence to impersonate others including politicians on the internet, notably via Twitter and Facebook.

,,,Now we all know that there are lots of standards in identity (SAML, WS-Federation, OpenID, CardSpace, etc.) but -- so far -- none are perfect for the cloud. Still, work is going on. OASIS has recently formed a technical committee (TC) to examine this issue, called the "Identity in the Cloud" TC.

WSO2 is shipping an open source--based identity application that runs in the cloud and is aimed at helping companies avoid building internal systems for identity management and authentication...WSO2 Cloud Identity lets administrators provide strong authentication using electronic IDs for users based on popular open standards including SAML 2.0, OpenID and Information Card token-based standards, according to the company. WSO2 Cloud Identity can issue cards or tokens for identity management, and support incoming SAML 2.0, OpenID and CardSpace authentication requests, the company said...