It's been a busy week for enterprise security stories -- Grid and otherwise.

One of the major Grid headlines was that Sun's massive government Grid deployment had been stalled by nebulous security concerns. In Bob McMillan's article that broke the news, the ever-quotable Jonathan Schwartz explained the moment where the snag occurred:

"Our servers are considered munitions by the federal government," Schwartz said. "So when we wanted to provision servers off of our computers to a global population, the federal government got involved and said, 'we'd like to know all the people who use this.'"

What's interesting about this story is that - real or imagined - security concerns will freeze a customer's wallet faster than anything. While enterprise Grid adoption is still in its infancy -- it's a safe bet that we'll see a lot of these types of knee-jerk security reactions in major enterprise roll-outs. It will be interesting to follow how Sun handles the situation.

In other enterprise Security news, the industry was very intrigued by IBM and Novell's joint announcement of Project Higgins -- the trust framework for user-centric identity management. Identity management is a cornerstone of Grid security as well. The Grid community is certainly excited to have an open source framework that will allow better integration / interoperability of multiple identity systems. And we're lucky this month to have a Q&A with one of IBM's lead identity management technologists, Nataraj Nagaratnam, who elaborates on Project Higgins and other Grid-specific security issues.

You'll also hear from the technical leaders and developers of various Grid projects in e-Science and Academia. As we discussed last August, security is certainly not an afterthought in the research and science Grid world.

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