Everything in our society, from business to the Internet, is about trust and reputation. A solid Identity Management Infrastructure is fundamental to “transmit” reputation, and then, to be able to create the trust links.
Preparing a migration to the cloud must always be preceded by the creation of an Identity Management platform. With it, you will be able to interact with the cloud service providers, and also integrate your local infrastructure with the cloud: users will be able to access your LAN using a 802.1x access control system; login in a desktop with Microsoft Windows Cardspace; read their email on the Google APPs; do a deal with a Salesforce CRM application; write a document on ThinkFree.com Write (or better, on the Zoho Writer ), etc.

Ok, this is not as easy at it looks (at least for the time being). Identity Management is a very complex subject and a target of many and very enthusiastic discussions. As an example we have the recent “fight” about the OASIS XRI 2.0 specification. Even the “father” (Tim Berners-Lee) of the Web was part of this discussion:
“We are not satisfied that XRIs provide functionality not
readily available from http: URIs. Accordingly the TAG recommends
against taking the XRI specifications forward, or supporting the use of
XRIs as identifiers in other specifications”

You can follow this on the openid.net post: http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2008-May/004817.html.

Despite all of this, we already have a group of technological solutions that provides the necessary basis for a solid Identity Management infrastructure. The last one to joint this group was the Geneva from Microsoft, but already have solutions from the major IT companies:

• OpenSSO from SUN
• IBM Tivoli identity management from IBM
  
• Identity and Security Management from Novel
• Shibboleth from Internet2 and  Open Source

The majority of this solutions are following the path of normalization, they are implementing OASIS specifications like WS-* (WS-Trust, WS-Secutity, etc),  SAML1/2, or even OpenID.  This is a very important decision, without this normalizations efforts we won’t be able to achieve one of the major objectives (characteristic) of a real Cloud – Interoperability. A great example in this direction are the recent Microsoft decisions about Geneva: http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1018.

Another example, this time in the OpenID field, is the work done by the OpenID Japan. Take a look on the incredible list of member companies that they have, including technological companies, banks and insurance companies.