Several noteworthy updates crossed the wire in the past week, including some good news for mobile workers.

Authentication software maker SecureEnvoy and PasswordBanks teamed up to create a password manager for users who access popular services such as Office365 and Salesforce.com from their phones. PasswordBanks’ cloud-based password management solution, or ‘Identity as a Service,’ is the heart of the project.

EMC also had a cloud service announcement last week: the storage giant unveiled an on-premise version of the Syncplicity file sharing solution. The offering, which runs on Isilon storage, is targeted at corporate clients who are interested in the cloud but are not yet willing to replace portions of their infrastructure for a hosted service.  A strong reason to keep things locked on premise is security: organizations that deal with sensitive information have become more wary in the wake of the increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, many of which made headlines in recent months.

Just like EMC, Hewlett-Packard is also beefing up its cloud infrastructure portfolio. The hardware maker announced that its converged cloud business has been bumped up to ‘unit’ status, a big moral boost for converged cloud SVP Saar Gallai and his team.

The final news item in this roundup is courtesy of AMD.  The company  introduced a new motherboard that’s designed to power the kind of workload-specific servers that Google and Facebook use to support billions of users in a highly efficient manner.

The chip is powered by two of the newly debuted Opteron 6300 series processors, and features a total of 24 memory sockets. Open 3.0, as it’s called, is the first product of its kind to support Facebook’s Open Rack standard, a specification for ultrafast – and eco-friendly – servers.