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CSA Establishes New SMB Membership Level and Working Group
April 2013 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced a new membership level and working group designed to benefit the rapidly growing needs of cloud computing among small and medium businesses (SMB). Launched today, the CSA SMB Membership and SMB Working Group, will focus on providing tailored guidance to SMBs and help cloud providers understand the requirements of this market.
For many SMBs around the world, cloud computing has grown to become an attractive and affordable service model with great benefit and value as it lowers the barrier to new technologies and markets by eliminating required big up front investments (CAPEX), something that is especially important in light of restricted business lending. Cloud providers, however, have been selective in adapting their services to mainly large companies, leaving small companies forced to settle with common terms and conditions.
“Small businesses are the workhorses of a strong economy, yet they continue to be faced with a myriad of challenges such as access to funding, skilled labor and new affordable technologies,” said Daniele Catteddu, CSA Managing Director EMEA. “By educating and helping these businesses understand and apply best practices to cloud computing, we hope to give them the cost-effective competitive edge to create new opportunities and markets for their businesses.”
Among its first priorities, the CSA SMB Working Group will be tasked with creating an SMB version of the CSA Guidance, along with a number of materials related to cloud security that can be readily consumed by SMBs. The SMB Working Group also plans to organize a series of on-line workshops to discuss and gather research on small business cloud requirements and along with perceptions of current cloud alliance guidance. Based on its research, the group plans to issues the first CSA SMB Cloud Guidance document by year’s end.
The CSA SMB Working Group is a new global initiative by the CSA being led by the UK Chapter. Charter member companies include Spamina out of the EMEA region and AKSAAS PTE LTD out of the APAC region. The working group will be lead by Vladimir Jirasek of Jirasek Security Consulting and Paul Davies of Verizon Terremark.
