During her keynote at RSA Europe earlier this week, Adrienne Hall, Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing General Manager, announced the release of a tool that will help companies with up to 500 employees understand the impact of cloud migration.
The goal is to help IT managers understand what they’re getting into if they move to the cloud. Called the Cloud Security Readiness Tool, Microsoft has taken away some of the general cloud focus seen in a previous release, and focuses more on customized security, privacy and reliability guidance in this release.
“[It] helps organizations better understand and improve their current IT state, identify relevant industry regulations, and evaluate whether cloud adoption will meet their business needs,” a Microsoft spokesperson explained.
The CSRT looks at security maturity in ten areas, and can be customized to various verticals, as well as the standards that most apply to each one. There’s 27 questions, weighted based on where the organization currently stands, and where they plan to go, and it can help identify an organization’s industry and control standards i.e. HIPPA, ISO, PCI
“In the Cloud Security Alliance, industry leaders have collaborated to develop best practice security guidance and encourage vendor transparency,” said Jim Reavis, Executive Director, Cloud Security Alliance. “Microsoft’s Cloud Security Readiness Tool builds on these efforts, providing a tool and custom report which enables organizations to better understand their current IT state and more easily evaluate cloud services against critical areas and compliance with common industry standards.”
The tool is available for download here.
A report generated by SecurityWeek, using answers from the lowest readiness levels can be seen here in PDF format.