This year’s RSA conference brought with it two major news breaks concerning IT and the cloud as a whole, starting with the military and deputy secretary of defense William Lynn.   CNET notes that Lynn proposed in his keynote that the military should extend its technological shields, what the secretary referred to as “active defenses,” to key private sector networks operating crucial infrastructure. However, it’s not clear whether the military would provide the relevant private entities the technology alone, or will also include governmental oversight.

“But the power to monitor civilian networks for bad behavior includes the ability to monitor in general, and it was the NSA that also pioneered a controversial warrantless wiretapping program under the Bush administration.”

This concern is escorted by other issues as well, including what will be considered as crucial infrastructure – civilian infrastructure such as power plants, or major tech companies and widely used services such as Gmail.

Lynn described this cyber defense technology as a combination of a “sentry” and a network “sharpshooter.”

In the second highlight from the RSA conference, the cloud was really at the center of attention. RSA executive chairman and executive EMC VP Art Coviello took the stage and discussed the growing importance of the cloud and cloud security. He continued to point out that cloud computing enables a whole new level of information-centric security, where it becomes built-in and automated, risk based and adaptive. VMware chief development officer and co-president Richard McAniff followed Coviello, saying the cloud is changing security polices. This however was only the intro to the bigger news VMware broke RSA: the new RSA Cloud Trust Authority service set.

“In the spirit of teamwork, Coviello gave RSA Conference 2011 attendees a sneak peek at the RSA Cloud Trust Authority, an upcoming set of services that RSA and VMware will launch to provide visibility, control and security to cloud computing and virtualization environments.”

In addition to RSA and VMware; Cisco, Intel, Citrix and others are also a part of the partnership. The first set of RSA Cloud Trust Authority services will offer identity, information and infrastructure monitoring and control, and will launch in the second half of 2011.