The security level of major cloud vendors

February 18, 2011

What is the actual security level of three major cloud vendors? Information security company Neupart provides the answers to this in a new report.

Among other things, cloud security depends on whether the service in question is infrastructure (e.g. renting virtual servers and storage), platform (for the use of e.g. company specific applications) or software as a service. The ladder is at the moment the most commonly used service supporting CRM, financial management and email to mention a few. The three types of cloud computing,  SaaS, PaaS and IaaS - sometimes referred to as the SPI model -  places the responsibility for security differently. Are you renting the infrastructure it will most likely be up to you to take care of security. Software as a service normally comes with a certain amount of security features. But how about platform as a service which can be viewed as something in-between IaaS and SaaS?

In order to investigate the security level you can expect as a customer, Neupart compared the security level of three major cloud vendors. The criteria for comparison were chosen from two of the best resources for risk assessment of cloud vendors: Cloud Security Alliance and ENISA. We collected information about the three vendors cloud services made public by each vendor, and assessed their level of maturity on the selected topics.

We will, no doubt, see a lot of things happening with cloud computing in the near future. As an example there is a relatively large difference in the level of documentation provided by the three vendors at the moment.

Register here to get your free copy of the cloud security analysis.