You can Benefit from the Cloud: Choose based on Class of Service

In my last blog, I had promised a deeper dive into Choosing a Cloud provider based on Class of Service.

It is a very timely topic. In one of very many recent articles on cloud security, Avoiding cloud security pitfalls Telstra enterprise and infrastructure services IT director Lalitha Biddulph advises “A lot of cloud services are proprietary and once you move your data in there, you may have given away your right to shift data by choosing to use a particular service.”

Without a doubt this is an area of risk to be balanced when making decisions about which key vendors to use when you consider public cloud usages across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS models. It is also an area of opportunity where organizations can draw up distinct SLAs around their rights with their data and ensure that the SLAs are properly drawn up, communicated and agreed to by all parties prior to moving data across.

Over the last couple of years we have seen remarkable strides forward with cloud providers becoming much more diligent in not only improving levels of security for hosted email, customer relationship management and vertically-focused applications, but also with IaaS providers becoming much more flexible in conditions around SLAs and reporting.

I continue to feel greatly encouraged by the work that the Cloud Security Alliance is doing and it is why I invest my time in their activities. I believe that they have the power with their wealth of resource and broad industry participation to continue to educate the industry and move us forward with ideal frameworks based on consensus.

While I think caution should be urged and organizations should be in no doubt about the risks that their data can be exposed to in cloud models, this should also be balanced with the economic advantages. Added, to that, cloud models have matured for the types of services I have mentioned above and others – that too should be taken into consideration along with a robust set of security controls.

Additionally, for more news and discussions, head over to @SecDatacenter or Secure Data Center Trends

Evelyn de Souza Bio

Evelyn is a senior data center and cloud security strategist for the Security Technology Group at Cisco responsible for championing holistic and next generation security solutions . She is a strong proponent of building automated, repeatable processes that enable organizations to sustain compliance while optimizing security posture and reducing costs. To this end, she pioneered the development of such tools in her previous role as the McAfee Compliance Mapping Matrix, which cross-maps various regulations, standards, and frameworks to e solutions and the McAfee PCI Mapping Tool. She currently co-chairs the Cloud Security Alliance Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) and is focused on harmonizing efforts across industry initiatives such as the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA). Evelyn is a dedicated security professional with more than 12 years in the IT security industry. She enjoys engaging with industry analysts, customers, and partners to discuss industry trends and how security solutions can be best implemented to meet the needs of next-generation datacenters. She holds a Bachelors of Arts degree with honors in music from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She can also be found on Twitter at: e_desouza