Introducing CAIQ-Lite

By Dave Christiansen, Marketing Director, Whistic

The Cloud Security Alliance and Whistic are pleased to release CAIQ-Lite beta, a new framework for cloud vendor assessment.

CSA and Whistic identified the need for a lighter-weight assessment questionnaire in order to accommodate the shift to cloud procurement models, and to enable cybersecurity professionals to more easily engage with cloud vendors. CAIQ-Lite was developed to meet the demands of an increasingly fast-paced cybersecurity environment, where adoption is becoming paramount when selecting a vendor security questionnaire.

With the initial objective of developing an effective questionnaire containing 100 or less questions, CAIQ-Lite contains 73 questions compared to the 295 found in the CAIQ, while maintaining representation of 100 percent of the original 16 control domains present in the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) 3.0.1. Contributing research leveraged multiple sources of CSA member and Whistic customer feedback, as well as a panel of hundreds of IT security professionals. Research behind Whistic’s proprietary scoring algorithm was utilized as a part of the final CAIQ-Lite question selection process.

We look forward to community feedback on CAIQ-Lite, which can be accessed by CSA members for free at Whistic, as well as from CSA. The current version will be improved over the next 12 months, based on additional community input. Also, any members that already have a CAIQ on the CSA STAR Program will automatically have a CAIQ-Lite generated for them on the Whistic Platform.

Click to access the full whitepaper, containing further details regarding the creation and deployment of this new cloud service questionnaire.