Art Coviello, president of RSA, the security division of EMC, and Enrique Salem, president and CEO of Symantec, each delivered keynote addresses at the conference today about future endeavors that sounded quite similar in terms of their goals in cloud-based security.

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Symantec is calling its effort O3, described by Salem as a "layer above the clouds" that could be used by cloud-service providers to gain and provide to their customers security and compliance. The service might include functions such as password single sign-on.

In his keynote Coviello alluded to an effort by RSA and VMware, which is part of EMC, to make use of owned technologies such as the Archer GRC platform to build a software-based framework that cloud-service providers could use to protect software-as-a-service . The RSA and VMware teams are calling that effort "Project Horizon."

Coviello also introduced a related concept, "Cloud Trust Authority," that would provide control of identity resources. Neither effort has an announced time to deliver specific products or services.