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The standardization of data governance policies especially for the cloud environments is key to helping accelerate adoption of cloud computing in the Asia Pacific due to its extremely heterogeneous nature.

James Lee, director of business strategy, Trend Micro Singapore, stated on the results of the Cloud Consumer Advocacy Questionnaire and Information Survey conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Cloud Data Governance (CDG) working group.

As a sponsor of the initiative, James added, “We look forward to the future work products, which will build on these findings to help consumers build get greater awareness and seek value from the best practices defined for governing and operating data and information in the cloud.”

The survey, which is the first deliverable for the CDG working group, gathers inputs from consumers on the current state of public cloud provider maturity and other key issues. Such issues include data aggregation and inference, use of data security controls and data backup and recovery schemes for recovery and restoration.

“Cloud computing shifts the emphasis from ‘systems’ to ‘data’, and as a result, stakeholders need to be aware of the best practices for governing and operating data and information in the cloud,” said Ryan Ko, one of the co-chairs of the CDG working group.

“With this initial survey, we aimed to capture the current state of data governance and data security capabilities offered by leading cloud service providers. These results will be extremely useful for our future guidance and research on best practices for data governance and security in the cloud,” he said.

Speaking on the initiative, Aloysius Cheang, Asia Pacific strategy advisor, Cloud Security Alliance, added, “The Cloud Data Governance survey aims to have a more complete understanding of the data life-cycle within a cloud environment. Through a phased approach, Cloud Security Alliance aims to address the key concerns of stakeholders who intend to execute a data-centric security strategy in the cloud.”

The group surveyed almost 50 subject matter experts in senior technical roles at organizations including the industry’s largest cloud providers worldwide. In addition to the survey results, the initial paper also provides working group recommendations in each area, to be expanded upon in future work products.