RSA, The Security Division of EMC, today announced the RSA Cloud Trust Authority, a set of cloud-based services designed to facilitate secure and compliant relationships among organisations and cloud service providers.
“Surveys show that lack of trust in cloud computing is slowing broader adoption of cloud services,” said Art Coviello, Executive Chairman, RSA, the Security Division of EMC. “While cloud computing offers tremendous benefits in cost and agility, it breaks down some of the traditional means of ensuring visibility and control of infrastructure and information. Forcing enterprises to develop trusted relationships individually with each cloud service provider they wish to use is cumbersome and will not scale. New thinking in security and compliance is required to provide a future in which organisations can consume services from a wide variety of cloud service providers on-demand and for all their application needs.”
Organisations will be able to manage relationships with cloud service providers via the RSA Cloud Trust Authority console making it easy it’s claimed to configure and deploy cloud-based security services.
“Today, enterprises wanting to leverage one or more cloud service providers have to create secure access methods, establish compliance measurement and data controls and solve a number of other security challenges,” said Drew Simonis, Group Information Security Officer, Willis Group Holdings, plc. “The complexity and cost of establishing trusted relationships with each provider erodes the value of cloud computing by slowing down the ability to provision new providers as part of the total IT portfolio. The approach RSA is taking with the RSA Cloud Trust Authority holds promise for changing that by creating an intermediary for hosted security and compliance services and will move the burden of establishing trusted cloud computing from the customer to the cloud.”
“The fundamental value of the RSA Cloud Trust Authority approach to services providers is that it helps eliminate a key source of friction slowing down adoption of cloud computing—the requirement to ensure security and compliance across their enterprise IT resources and their outsourced cloud-based resource,” said Ken Owens, Vice President of Security and Cloud Technology, Savvis. “By offering an elegant model for customers to establish trusted relationships with service providers more rapidly, RSA’s approach will accelerate the adoption of our services by a wider set of customers for security-sensitive applications.”
“Security remains top of mind for organisations that wish to leverage the public cloud more extensively,” said Jim Reavis, Executive Director of the Cloud Security Alliance. “The standards and recommendations developed by the Cloud Security Alliance are most effective when they are put into practice by the security industry. RSA has contributed actively to the Cloud Security Alliance standards and was among the first to embrace the Cloud Security Alliance standards within its products. With the RSA Cloud Trust Authority, RSA is taking another decisive step towards delivering comprehensive and innovative solutions for securing the cloud. The approach of delivering cloud security services spanning identity, information, and infrastructure will address key concerns that limit the adoption of the cloud.”
Beta Program
A beta of the RSA Cloud Trust Authority will be available in the second half of 2011, and will include both Identity and Compliance offerings. “The Cloud Trust Authority is a very strategic investment area for RSA, one with direct involvement of virtually every technology team across the division. We will be actively engaging with both enterprises and cloud service providers right away in shaping the future of this solution,” said Tom Corn, Chief Strategy Officer, RSA. “Trusted relationships only work with the active engagement of all parties. We see enterprises and service providers as participants in shaping the RSA Cloud Trust Authority. The beta program will lay the foundation for broad-based rollout of these services.”
Partner Program
Through the RSA Cloud Trust Authority, RSA is building an ecosystem of cloud service providers who will collaborate with RSA to enable secure and compliant cloud computing. RSA is establishing a partner program for cloud service providers who wish to participate in the Cloud Trust Authority.
For more information on the Cloud Trust Authority and early access visit the web site at http://www.rsa.com.
To track the latest RSA Conference 2011 happenings, including news releases, keynote videos, and event photos and videos, visit http://www.rsa.com/rsaconference2011
