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.

At the same conference, CA demonstrated a product called Federation Manager, designed to provide single sign-on across several internal and external cloud or SaaS applications.

The problem the two are offering to solve is federated identity management—the need to connect and synchronize user data between external service providers and internal IT security measures...

In addition to specific products, OASIS and other standards organizations have been working on security specifications such as the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), the Web Services Federation Language (WS-Federation), or earlier Liberty Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF)...

Read the complete article by Kevin Fogarty in CIO Magazine.