Security aspects of procuring cloud

ICT2015 this year was the perfect location for PICSE to meet opinion leaders from EU funding agencies, industry and research sector to discuss the main challenges and best practices related to cloud procurement.

PICSE Wizard (http://wiz.picse.eu): Cloud service procurement made easy!
Are you a Procurement official, IT manager or procurement initiator? Then, complete the PICSE wizard easy-to-use services to help you make informed decisions about how to procure cloud services. The PICSE Wizard is a web-based application that public research organisations can use to obtain guidelines on the most suitable model for procuring cloud services, to make a self-assessment and evaluate their procurement procedures. Each checklist comes with a set of recommendations & tips.

Digital transformation is absolutely crucial to any organisation whether public or private. It is at the very core of the digital single market to ensure Europe reaps the socio-economic benefits of new technologies. Cloud computing has the potential to reduce IT expenditure and boost organisational agility while at the same time improving the scope for delivering flexible high-quality new services.
This document describes the experience of ten public sector organisations across Europe who have either carried out a process to procure cloud services, or are considering doing so. The experiences vary in terms of success and offer insights into how the procurement of cloud services is impacting on their current processes. Read more...

The acquisition of IT services is key to any public or private organisation and the advent of cloud computing requires innovation in the procurement of cloud services. Although cloud computing has become increasingly popular, it appears that potential customers, in the public sector in general and in the research community in particular, are facing barriers that inhibit the wider adoption of cloud services. This report presents a list of barriers to cloud services procurement identified through literature, in-depth interviews of IT managers surveyed over a period of 3 months, and input provided by the PICSE Task Force members as well as intergovernmental research organisations such as CERN and EMBL. The survey demonstrated that barriers to cloud service procurement mainly relate to the adoption of new technology (i.e. cloud computing) and the procurement process itself...

CCSM, the cloud certification schemes metaframework, is a metaframework of relevant cloud certification schemes. The goal of CCSM is to increase transparency about existing certification schemes and to help customers with cloud security when procuring cloud services.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council has just released the guide " The Practical Guide to Cloud Service Agreements". It provides a practical reference to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers analyze cloud service agreements (CSAs) from different cloud service providers. The paper informs decision makers of what to expect and what criteria to use as they evaluate CSAs from such potential suppliers.

This report gives guidance on the process from pre-procurement till finalisation and exit from a cloud contract, explaining which are the steps to take when focusing on security and privacy. It offers example approaches, based on four already deployed governmental cloud models in a national level namely: Estonia, Greece, Spain and United Kingdom. As this report is not only a guide but also a tool, in the Annex the reader will find the actual questionnaire template to use.