Cloud Security Alliance Releases Report on State of Cloud Adoption in India

Findings Come on the Heels of Successful CSA APAC Congress in Bengaluru

Bengaluru, India – November 22, 2016 – The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, successfully hosted its 4th CSA APAC Congress on 22nd-23rd November in Bengaluru, India. This two-day event hosted delegates from over 300 international government organizations, industry, academia, and professionals attending with compelling presentations and interesting discussions about research, development, practice and trends related to cloud security.

The conference featured some of the region’s and world’s most influential minds in information security and cloud computing including:

• Shri. Ajay Kumar, Additional Secretary at Ministry of Electronics & Information technology
• Rajiv R. Chetwani, Director Information Systems Programme Office at ISRO
• Sri. Raj Kumar Srivastava, IFS , Managing director , Karnataka State Electronics,Development Corporation Limited
• Dr. Amar Prasad Reddy , Director General at National Cyber- Safety & Security Standards
• Jim Reavis, Co-founder & CEO of Cloud Security Alliance
• Dr. Meng Chow Kang, Chief Information Security Officer, APJC Region at Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Juanita Koilpillai, Founder & CEO of Waverley Labs
• Rudra Murthy, CISO, Digital India at Ministry of Home Affairs
• Debabrata Nayak, Chief Security Officer at Huawei
• Dr. Vikram Sharma, Founding Director & Chief Executive Officer at Quintessence Labs
• Clayton Jones, Managing Director Asia- Pacific, (ISC)2

For additional information and the agenda, visit https://www.eventbank.com/event/648/

Cloud Security Alliance also announced the release of the survey report State of Cloud Adoption in India. This report is part of an ongoing series of research initiatives, to provide insights on cloud adoption across the APAC region, to recognize APAC countries leading the cloud adoption trend, as well as to identify countries with opportunities for cloud computing adoption. The State of Cloud Adoption in India report posed two key findings for the region:

• A lack of established industry standards within the Indian cloud computing industry is a lingering problem the country faces. Public cloud services offered in India by local providers are commonly proprietary to a great extent, which may pose challenges for cloud consumers in case they wanted to develop a global IT strategy; not to mention moving from one cloud provider to another. In addition, the current state of relevant national standards in India is not compatible and aligned with global standards.
• Indian organizations are extremely concerned about security, especially data sovereignty. Organizations are most worried about their data on the cloud. Data breach and data loss are major concerns of organizations from a cloud security perspective.

Aloysius Cheang, Executive Vice President and Managing Director APAC of the Cloud Security Alliance said, “This study is critical for us to understand the current landscape in India. The results are both expected and shocking. It is expected that data sovereignty and data breach will continue to toe the top line concerns of senior management in companies in India and other parts of the world. But it is shocking to find that while there is an increase usage of cloud services in India, but the maturity and the strategic use of cloud services lags where behind other countries that we have surveyed. Coming from the ICT capital of the world, that is shocking”.
Speaking at the launch, Sandip Kumar Panda, CEO – InstaSafe said “While Cloud adoption in India is on the rise, security concerns still dominate a lot of discussions about movement to cloud. The objective of conducting this survey, in conjunction with CSA, was to understand the Indian CIO’s mindset, the current adoption status, unearth gaps in widespread adoption and work with the industry to help assuage those fears. It would be imperative for Indian CIO’s to read the report to understand where they are on the adoption cycle and work with their vendors in asking the right questions.”

In addition to the other conference highlights, CSA announced the release of a new research working group SaaS Governance.

SaaS Governance Working Group

The SaaS Governance Working Group aims to benefit all parties in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecosystem by supporting a common understanding of SaaS related risks from the perspectives of the cloud customer and cloud service provider. Security and privacy are the primary concerns for organizations considering SaaS adoption, and recent research indicates that 77% of SaaS-adopting organizations have experienced SaaS-specific security incidents. SaaS services account for the bulk of the cloud industry market, and any security incident could critically impact cloud customers. SaaS services present unique risks to their cloud customers such as highly business process specific, handle and store critical business and personal data, and much more. Due to heavy competitive pressure in the SaaS market today, security is too often not a top priority for SaaS providers - especially for the smaller providers that may not have the necessary security expertise to identify and manage the risks that could impact cloud customers and the cloud provider’s own operations.

For more information on on the SaaS Governance Working group along with other CSA research initiatives, events and education, visit https://cloudsecurityalliance.org.

About Cloud Security Alliance

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. CSA harnesses the subject matter expertise of industry practitioners, associations, governments, and its corporate and individual members to offer cloud security-specific research, education, certification, events and products. CSA’s activities, knowledge and extensive network benefit the entire community impacted by cloud — from providers and customers, to governments, entrepreneurs and the assurance industry — and provide a forum through which diverse parties can work together to create and maintain a trusted cloud ecosystem. CSA has developed the definitive best practices for the industry, such as the “Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing”, the “Cloud Controls Matrix”, “Top Threats to Cloud Computing” and 50 other cloud security research artifacts.