Questions to ask of a cloud provider

At the RSA Conference Europe 2010, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) released version 1.0 of the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire.

The questionnaire is available in spreadsheet format, and provides a set of questions a cloud consumer and cloud auditor may wish to ask of a cloud provider.

It provides a series of “yes or no” control assertion questions which can then be tailored to suit each unique cloud customer’s evidentiary requirements. This question set is a simplified distillation of the issues, best practices and control specifications from the CSA Guidance and Cloud Controls Matrix, intended to help organizations build the necessary assessment processes for engaging with cloud providers.

For more information on cloud security challenges, read our interview with CSA Executive Director Jim Reavis.