Jonathan Penn of Computerworld writes: Trying to avoid the obvious and the already underway, here are my predictions for 2010. 1. Cloud security standards emerge. By the end of 2010, we’ll see a framework emerge for establishing a well defined set of technology, practices, and processes, organised into different levels of trust. Ultimately, adherence to these specifications will need be certified by third parties. The effort won’t be complete, but it will be underway. Look to the government as key industry (other than the vendors) driving this effort. COROLLARY: The use of cloud will take off as adopting organisations by and large overcome their security concerns – or at least, understand them at a specific enough level to seek out providers that satisfy these concerns. 2. Federation will start to take off by the end of 2010. Use of federation will be fueled by SaaS and cloud computing and the need for single sign-on to bridge identity from the enterprise to those external environments. Where standards reign over kludges, SAML will be the leading mechanism. OpenID will continue to be just a lab toy for the "Identerati"...

Read the complete article in Computerworld UK.