The Cloud Security Alliance is aiming to make it easier for organizations to be compliant with its cloud security specifications and to adopt new Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) security approaches.
The CSA is a multistakeholder effort that provides the industry with best practices, guidance and certification for cloud security. Its key certification effort is the CSA Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR), whose goal is to help cloud providers and their users validate cloud security status.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Daniele Catteddu, CTO of the CSA, details the new efforts and how they will help to advance the state of security in the cloud. The new STARWatch cloud security management software-as-a-service (SaaS) application’s goal is to make it easier for organizations to comply with the STAR certification and the CSA’s Cloud Controls Matrix.
“For years, CSA has mainly been focused on producing best practices and standards,” Catteddu told eWEEK. “Now we’re trying to figure out how to make our best practices more actionable.”
Catteddu said that STARWatch is a compliance and assurance-as-a-service SaaS offering. The goal of the STARWatch tool is to help simplify the process of collecting information in order to meet CSA standards. He added that in its initial iteration, STARWatch itself will not include a scanning tool that collects data directly.
“STARWatch is meant to be a database of audit inputs,” Catteddu explained.
Software Defined Perimeter
The CSA is also expanding its SDP methodology to work with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers. SDP was first announced by the CSA back in March 2014 as a new approach to implementing security controls without a hardware-based perimeter. The basic premise behind SDP is that user and application identity are used to help control and define access.
Watch the full video interview with Daniele Catteddu, CTO of the CSA.