Cloud Security Alliance EMEA Congress Event Highlights

On November 19-20, 2014, nearly 200 cloud security professionals gathered in Rome, Italy, for the third edition of CSA EMEA Congress. Continuing the trend of previous years, EMEA Congress once again confirmed its distinctive characteristic of being the venue where cloud service providers, cloud customers, policy makers, legislators, security and privacy experts gather together to discuss both technical and compliance challenges. This year’s feature-rich event showcased the progress made in the development of best practices for cloud governance, compliance, identity management and forensics. CSA EMEA Congress featured eight keynotes and 36 speakers who covered the most pressing topics and trends in the space of cloud computing, big data and Internet of Things. At this year’s event there was a perceivable shift in discussions towards the presentation of concrete experiences, where companies such as Walmart and LinkedIn described their journey to the cloud and lessons learned along the way. Additionally, many stakeholders, including the European Commission and ENISA, underlined Europe’s distinct perspective on cloud computing, with an emphasis on data protection and government clouds, and with a view towards a harmonized approach across a single market of 28 member states. A notable highlight of CSA EMEA Congress was the introduction of a prototype of the new CSA STAR tool. The tool provides an integrated platform for cloud providers to submit responses to the CAIQ questionnaire in the STAR registry, in a way that can later be searched and ranked by cloud customers according to their interests. This is something to watch in the upcoming months! Finally, at CSA EMEA Congress, CSA released the final draft of the Privacy Level Agreement for Europe v2 https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/download/privacy-level-agreement-europe-v-2/ and also presented the new upcoming working group on Quantum Safe Cryptography. We would like to thank all that attended this year’s event and look forward to sharing updates on the many exciting items discussed and introduced at this year’s event! Daniele Catteddu, Managing Director, CSA EMEA