Cloud Security Alliance Announces General Availability of STARWatch Cloud Security Management Application

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 13, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- RSA Conference 2017 - The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world's leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, today announced the launch of STARWatch, a Software as a Service (SaaS) application. Developed by the CSA, the application is designed to provide organizations a centralized way to manage and maintain the integrity of the vendor review and assessment process. Additionally, STARWatch includes access to more than 200 CSA STAR assessments, helping organizations save time with research and aiding in quicker decision making.

STARWatch delivers the content of the CSA's de facto standards Cloud Control Matrix (CCM) and CSA's Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire v3.0.1 (CAIQ) in a database format, enabling users to manage compliance of cloud services with the CSA best practices. STARWatch is designed to provide cloud users, providers, auditors, security providers assurance and compliance on demand. During the initial beta phase, CSA achieved tremendous success with more than 250 active licenses activated.

The STARWatch application provides users the ability to:

• Manage all cloud service providers and their own private clouds to assure a consistent security baseline is maintained.
• Build and maintain a CSA Security Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) entry and provide customers with rapid responses to their compliance questions.
• Perform audits and assessments of cloud services/provider security.
• Have a clear reference between CCM controls and the corresponding controls in other industry standards.
• Leverage the STARWatch solution database format and technical specifications for integration within an organization's cloud environment.
• Enabling sharing and peer reviewing of cloud services security assessments.

"We have been part of the STARWatch beta program and have been incredibly happy with the results," said Jerry Archer, CSO and industry expert. "STARWatch facilitates the use of the Cloud Control Matrix and CSA's Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire, enabling us to run assessments and analysis much more rapidly than ever before and help us better manage our vendors. It also simplifies how we interact with things like CSA STAR as we are able to interact with the data in a much more useful and efficient way."

The CSA Security, Trust and Assurance Registry or STAR program is the industry's most powerful program for security assurance in the cloud and encompasses the key principles of transparency, rigorous auditing, harmonization of standards, with continuous monitoring. Currently there are 230 Cloud Service Providers in the STAR program including STAR Self-Assessment, STAR Certification, STAR Attestation and C-STAR Assessment.

"Compliance, assurance and vendor management are becoming more and more complex and resource intensive issues," said Daniele Catteddu, CTO for the Cloud Security Alliance. "We created the STARWatch application with two main objectives in mind – to simplify assurance and vendor management and streamline compliance."

CSA STARWatch is free to CSA corporate members. Non-members may purchase licenses starting at $3,000 annually for an Expert license and $5,000 annually for Enterprise licenses. For more information on the STARWatch application and how to purchase, visit https://star.watch/en.

About Cloud Security Alliance
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world's leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. CSA harnesses the subject matter expertise of industry practitioners, associations, governments, and its corporate and individual members to offer cloud security-specific research, education, certification, events and products. CSA's activities, knowledge and extensive network benefit the entire community impacted by cloud — from providers and customers, to governments, entrepreneurs and the assurance industry — and provide a forum through which diverse parties can work together to create and maintain a trusted cloud ecosystem. For further information, visit us at www.cloudsecurityalliance.org, and follow us on Twitter @cloudsa.

SOURCE Cloud Security Alliance

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