Next Identity Trend: Governance or Cloud?

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend and co-worker about the next trend in Identity Management.  My point (and a bit biased based on my interests) was that Identity in the Cloud is definitely the next trend based on the current environment of services being provided and the need.  His thought was Governance is next.  Now I really don't know what is the right answer, but I do think both are important.  Governance is driven by regulation, easier access to information and regulation cost savings, and Cloud by ease of use, faster implementation and implementation cost savings.

Matt Flynn posted an entry on his blog on "Governance - Next era of Identity" that has some interesting points and information about Governance.  Another example of this trend is Oracle with their Sun acquisition and the decision to re-brand Sun Role Manager as Oracle Identity Analytics.

What about Cloud?  Oracle on their next release of the Oracle Identity Management suite 11g is creating a framework that will allow for service-oriented security or (SOS) to be consumed by application providers with greater ease.   Tim Brown from CA posted on the CA IAM blog about "Trust and the Cloud - Identities are critical"

This tells me that that Governance and Identity as a Service (either private or public in the cloud) are in the radar of all vendors and clients are the only ones that will drive that trend.