Frustrated by what they see as a lack of
cloud-driven innovation from major IT suppliers, three huge global banks
are banding together to form an IT buying consortium that will not only
drive down their costs but also give them the option of creating their
own highly secure global cloud infrastructure and network rather than
relying on IBM, HP, Oracle, and Microsoft to deliver those solutions in a
timely manner.

Facebook's latest attempts to integrate more closely with the wider web have reignited controversy over its approach to user data. The social network's Open Graph protocol, announced at developer conference f8, is coming in for vocal criticism from prominent bloggers and state regulators. Allegations range from suggestions the protocol will leave members open to blackmail to claims Facebook is trying to dominate the web rather than make it more open. 

Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you
through the company’s new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has
come up with a simple tool that shows
you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or
service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a
user ID or user name.

Now truly is the time for organizations to invest in federated identity
management. Not surprising to hear that from me, but
it's actually a paraphrase of a statement by Tom Smedinghoff, partner
at Chicago law firm Wildman Harrold, in an interview
with Government
Information Security News.

There was much buzz about merging public and private cloud
infrastructures at last week's RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. As enterprises use virtualization to
step up the creation of private clouds around their data centers,
security vendors are working to steer customers toward merging private
and public clouds for a hybrid cloud approach.