What is the Cloud Security Alliance and the STAR program?
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a not-for-profit organization with a mission 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.”
The CSA’s mission is 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.
The CSA is led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, corporations, associations and other key stakeholders.
The CSA Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) is a tool that provides a set of security controls and activities to help cloud computing service providers and their customers understand the security requirements and controls, and their relationships to each other.
The Cloud Security Alliance have developed a self-assessment tool which is called the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ). The CAIQ can be used to conduct a self-assessment against the CCM. The CAIQ will generate a report which is a detailed description of the cloud vendor’s security controls and how these controls are applied.
