Dozens of cloud providers flock to achieve trust ‘seal of approval’

Over 50 cloud service providers have joined a cloud trust program that gives them a seal of approval for meeting data protection and legal requirements.

The CloudTrust Program was launched in January 2014 by Skyhigh Networks, and evaluates cloud service providers on data control, service security, business practices and legal protection. Providers who pass the requirements are awarded with the Skyhigh Enterprise-Ready seal of approval.

Providers who have joined the program include Accellion, Backupify, Egnyte, TargetX and WatchDox.

Brian Lillie, CIO of Equinix, claims he used the seal of approval to help select a service provider for his firm.

Lillie said: "We found that our employees were using multiple file-sharing services and that many of these services posed a risk to the organisation. We selected the most popular service rated Skyhigh Enterprise-Ready which was the obvious choice from both a productivity and security standpoint. The CloudTrust rating reduced a process that takes months down to a few hours."

Skyhigh said that the initiative is open to all cloud service providers including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers, and certification is free.

There are over 30 categories that are represented in the program, covering a wide spectrum such as collaboration, customer relationship management, networking, ecommerce and cloud infrastructure.

Skyhigh Networks CEO Rajiv Gupta said that the use of cloud services is often not approved because there is a feeling that cloud service security is insufficient universally.

Gupta said: "While security is lacking for many cloud services, seven percent of cloud service providers have invested time and resources in developing services that adhere to rigorous enterprise security requirements. We started the Skyhigh CloudTrust program to highlight these services and ease the cloud adoption lifecycle for CIOs and IT departments."

Whilst the program does seem to make lives easier for the CIO in terms of getting firms on board with cloud, we do wonder whether there will soon be a proliferation of different cloud service provider testing companies that may dilute the market, making a seal of approval mean less and less as customers are confused as to which to trust.