More than 35 often just recently founded initiatives, alliances and boards worldwide are working on frameworks, certification and auditing standards relating to cloud computing. It is not only the unmanageable amount of information generated by these alliances that is creating confusion and uncertainty among IT professionals, but also the fact that many of these standards are incomplete, superficial, immature overall, and frequently also focused only on particular regions. Companies wishing to assess the performance of their cloud service providers are left to battle their own way through the jungle of differing approaches. The KuppingerCole Advisory Note Cloud Provider Assurance offers an alternative: it gives an overview of the various approaches, separates the wheat from the chaff and names a manageable number of important controls that companies can use in order to assess the extent to which their cloud service providers deliver their services correctly and according to contractual and other regulations.
Many of the risks and compliance challenges currently described in connection with cloud computing are not new; they have existed for many years in the context of IT outsourcing, and are therefore considered in the best practices of established frameworks. This is why KuppingerCole is offering itsCloud Provider Assurance Advisory Note to assist IT professionals in adapting best practices from established frameworks relevant to their respective companies in order to assess cloud providers and apply these best practices to relationships with cloud providers within the company and at providers. The note focuses in particular on controls that can also be applied to internal IT and its performance, as ultimately the cloud is nothing other than a further model for procuring IT services alongside internal IT and outsourcing; the IT governance approaches should therefore also be consistent.
The Advisory Note moreover describes the main internal processes such as the handling of service requests and the classification of data and applications.
The Cloud Provider Assurance Advisory Note is now available for download fromhttp://www.kuppingercole.com/reports – as are all other KuppingerCole reports.
Best regrads,
Bettina Buthmann
Bettina Buthmann
KuppingerCole
Arnheimer Str. 46
40489 Duesseldorf
Germany
Phone: +49 (0)211-237077-23
Fax: +49 (0)211-237077-11
E-Mail: bb@kuppingercole.com
