Fast Tracking Your Cloud Risk Strategy

Will your Cloud fail the next audit? Do you have a handle on your risk strategy for the Cloud? Is this level of maturity only suited for Enterprises with large budgets? Can smaller organizations effectively manage risk as they consume Cloud services? They can!
Asset Classification, Questionnaires, and Risk Assessment; these tools are essential to manage Cloud Computing related risk. This session will outline how to build a scalable Cloud risk strategy based on ISO 27001, CSA Guidance and 3rd party attestations. This talk will set the tone and enable delegates to come home and fast track a Cloud Risk Strategy in their environment.

Cloud Security is only valuable if you have a robust process to identify risk. Managing risk for consuming Cloud is often overlooked. Many organizations feel that only the largest Enterprises can afford to understand and assess the potential or future risks. Instead of security, they focus on the perceived outcome of utilizing the Cloud, the supposed silver lining and use cases.

In this session, we will describe how to fast track a Cloud Risk Strategy. We will discuss how MARS built an effective toolkit based on trusted industry tools: ISO 27001, Cloud Security Alliance Guidance, and 3rd party attestations.

We will bring to true-to-life examples and case studies how this was done at a $34B enterprise and can scale to your environment. We will explain how CSA and ISO 27001 set the tone for our Cloud risk assessment strategy. We will rationalize how these were complemented by external attestations such as SOC1/2/3, penetration, vulnerability tests. We will expand on area of concerns for organizations of all sizes: SMB to Enterprise.

We will discuss how one gets started by providing a checklist driven roadmap to fast-track a Cloud risk strategy. We will start with identifying assets and their overall value to your organization. We will jump into the deep-end on asset classification and explore the particular importance of understanding implementation models and mapping out your data-flow. We will identify how this feeds into a holistic questionnaire that will poke holes through vendor Cloud Security practices. We will educate our delegates on how to ask vendors difficult questions and elicit responses from vendors who don't want to divulge information.

We will illustrate how to paint risk to the c-suite in an effective and compelling format. We will highlight practical recommendations for contractual negotiations, privacy, liability, exit-clauses and overall governance strategies to keep the sun shining through our Clouds.

In summary, building a Cloud risk strategy isn’t just suited for the largest Enterprises. By leveraging a pragmatic and scalable framework built on industry standards, we have defined best practices and lessons learned that organizations can leverage to effectively manage risk in their Cloud journey.