CSA Chapter Success Story: An Interview with the Japan Chapter Director

CSA’s chapters are made up of security professionals who volunteer to increase cloud security awareness in their local area and provide outreach for CSA research, education, and training resources. They work to solve cloud vulnerabilities and challenges by collaborating with other local experts in the field to establish cloud security best practices.

The CSA Japan Chapter aims to inform their region about CSA’s cloud security guidance and research and to raise the literacy of cloud security in Japan. They enjoy a membership of over 300 individuals and 35 corporations. The Chapter Director, Masahiro Morozumi, has worked in UNIX, RDBMS, and security engineering roles. Mr. Morozumi joined the chapter when it was established in 2010.

This interview with Mr. Morozumi highlights the accomplishments of the CSA Japan Chapter, including their research translations, events, and workshops.

How did you get involved with the CSA Japan Chapter?

Cloud has been maturing since 2006. I believed that cloud security would be the key area that needed to expand. CSA published the Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing v1 in 2009 and I thought the cloud security knowledge in the document would be useful for Japanese people. At the same time, some of the CSA Japan Chapter's original members gathered and started discussions to establish the chapter, which I joined.

What are some of your chapter’s most important contributions?

CSA Global has lots of documents and information about cloud security. Our most important contribution is to inform Japanese people about this information and to raise the literacy of cloud security in Japan. In addition to this, local working group activities discuss how to raise cloud security literacy effectively in Japan.

The CSA Japan Chapter has translated several documents into Japanese, including the CCM and CAIQ v4 and the Cloud Incident Response Framework. These translations make CSA research artifacts widely available to Japanese speakers. What was the process of creating them?

The process is as follows:

1. The CSA Japan Chapter has a Translation Working Group, which prioritizes which documents should be translated.
2. We ask our chapter members (corporate and individual) to join the translation project as volunteers.
3. We ask our CSA Global point of contact to provide the Word version of the original document.
4. Machine translation is done as the first draft of the translated document.
5. We assign parts of the document to volunteers. They review and correct the machine translated draft.
6. A final review (sometimes second and third reviews as well) is done by all volunteers.
7. We finish with editorial modifications and a disclaimer, and then finalize and publish the translated document with CSA Global.

What benefits have you seen as a result of these translations?

Many other organizations in Japan refer to the CSA documents after they are translated. The visibility of the CSA Japan Chapter seems to be improved by our translations.

What are some other activities that your chapter is involved in?

The following are the CSA Japan Chapter’s other main activities:

• Events: We hold a Summit in May and a Congress in November. The Summit mainly focuses on new trends in cloud and cloud security. In the Congress, local working group activities and outputs are presented.
• Workshops: The CSA Japan Chapter holds a workshop every month. It focuses on new technologies/solutions, explanation of CSA documents, explanation of products/solutions from corporate members, etc.
• Local working groups: Local working groups work on informing the Japanese market of CSA’s research and guidance. They also discuss how to leverage cloud security in Japan. As local people know the local market well, the working groups can effectively focus on the pain points.

What’s next for the chapter?

We are focusing on the following next steps:

• Collaboration with academics: Working with universities for further research focusing on cloud security and related technologies.
• Involvement of young people and college students: It’s important to consider how to transfer cloud security knowledge to young people. The CSA Japan Chapter will be working on this.

To learn more about CSA chapters and how to get involved, visit our chapters page.