12/4/11
By Sophie Baker
The Cloud Industry Forum and the Cloud Security Alliance have joined forces to drive best practice in cloud service provision.
The two not-for-profit organisations have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to partner on activities that will promote best practices and industry standards that surround the commercial adoption of cloud computing in a way that advocates security, transparency and trust between supplier and consumer.
“The aim of our partnership is to support each other’s market initiatives and in turn aid best practice adoption among cloud service providers, which we believe will also improve end-user awareness and confidence in cloud computing,” commented Andy Burton, chairman of the Cloud Industry Forum and CEO of Fasthosts.
“This relationship is also evidence of our objective of supporting other appropriate Cloud-based initiatives that complement the purpose of the Code of Practice, such as standards bodies seeking to provide common standards for security, privacy and interoperability. The CSA is a very credible and trusted voice in the market for driving awareness and best practices for the security of cloud-based services among vendors and subscribers, and to that end they complement the work of CIF in driving the Code of Practice principles in delivering critical information about the transparency, capability and accountability of CSPs.”
Jim Reavis, executive director, Cloud Security Alliance, added that the CSA will effectively be the security specialist partner to the CIF that will “in turn both reference and endorse CSA activity such as the best practice statements required of Service providers in our Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire. In addition, we will align ourselves in support of the CSP Code of Practice recently launched by the Cloud Industry Forum.”
The Cloud Industry Forum was set up in 2009 to provide transparency through certification to a Code of Practice for credible online Cloud service providers and to assist end-users in determining core information necessary to enable them to adopt these services. The Cloud Security Alliance was formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.
