With the rise of cloud computing services a lot of attention is now being paid to potential security issues. The concern that most internal IT organizations raise when it comes to cloud computing services is that they can not be sure how secure data will be as its moves from their internal systems out to a public cloud service.

Given the fact that this is one of the major issues that prevents traditional enterprise customers from embracing cloud computing, it's little wonder that vendors are starting to focus on it.

For example, CohesiveFT, which makes management software that gives control over cloud computing services to individual customers, has added a new virtual private network capability. This approach essentially establishes a secure conduit between the customer and whatever cloud computing service they choose to use.

In the meantime, TriCipher has created an implementation of its identity management software specifically for cloud computing services. The idea is that enterprise customers can rely on an identity management cloud computing service to make sure that only the right people have access to the right applications running across any number of cloud computing services. In effect, TriCipher has created a federated security model around cloud computing services.

There is still more work to be done when it comes to securing the whole cloud computing model. But clearly the vendor community has seen an opportunity here so it should not be surprising if we see droves of cloud computing announcement related to security in the coming months.

In the meantime, economic conditions continue to make cloud computing offerings difficult to ignore, especially as we gear up for 2009 IT budgets that are already under an intense amount of pressure.