Dave Kearns indentified three separate focus areas for Identity and Cloud Computing in his Network World post today:

Identity-in-the-cloud, or Identity as a Service:

IdM services such as provisioning, governance, role management, compliance, etc. are hosted "in the cloud."

Identity-for-the-cloud:

Provisioning services for cloud apps provided by traditional, on-premise, provisioning vendors as well as other identity services (privileged user management, compliance, etc.) extended to the cloud from your data center.

Meshed, or integrated, on-premise/in-the-cloud:

Linking on-premises Identity Management infrastructure and cloud identity data from cloud-hosted applications.

More than anything, this points out that Identity Management and Cloud Computing is a multi-faceted issue.  “Cloud” may refer to where the Identity Management services are hosted, as well as where the applications reside that consume Identity Management services – or a combination of both.

Certainly worth further exploration.