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.