Wave Systems announced the launch of id.wave.com, a new identity service that enables strong authentication and single sign-on to Web services and applications in the cloud. The service is available in beta form and will be demonstrated to prospective partners and industry insiders at this week's Digital ID World Conference in Las Vegas, Sept. 15-16. As Web-based applications and services increase in both number and importance, knowing who is on the other end of the cloud in a secure and private way is increasingly vital.

The Health IT Standards Committee today endorsed a set of security and privacy standards for electronic health record systems that it said would get progressively tougher without holding back wider health information sharing. The committee’s security and privacy workgroup clarified requirements that electronic health record systems must meet so both vendors and healthcare providers could use a number of access controls in their electronic health record systems and practices by 2011...

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.

Ping Identity will participate in this year’s Burton Catalyst interoperability demo, showing how its PingConnect on-demand Single Sign-On (SSO) service acts as a single integration point with Google Apps, Active Directory and virtually any other identity provider system to deliver a universal Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) login that ties together different SaaS environments by managing user access and authentication in the cloud. Users can now login once at their primary identity domain, then directly access their other SaaS applications by simply clicking a link.

Microsoft announced product names for its latest claims-based identity management server platform, dropping the "Geneva" code name. The Geneva platform (once known as project "Zermatt") consists of three components, and Microsoft unveiled relatively straightforward product names for each. The name switch was announced on Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.