Commissioned by Oracle

1 Introduction

Digital Transformation has profoundly changed our entire society, especially in the last decade. The world today is quickly growing more digitalized, interconnected, and complex.

Most companies seem to intuitively understand the cloud’s operational benefits such as elastic scale, reducing costs, automation, and even security. Yet some see risks such as added network latency, potential availability problems, or the risk of cloud vendor or platform lock-in.

A surprising majority of IT specialists see the cloud as a more secure alternative to their existing on-premises infrastructure. This can be especially true for smaller companies with limited IT security staff. All Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) invest heavily in the security and compliance of their infrastructure and gladly offer their customers a large portfolio of security solutions and services.

Cloud provider selection and assurance should be a major part of every organization’s IT governance. Otherwise, security can devolve into a “cargo cult”, its only purpose being another checkbox in a compliance audit form.

However, many companies are still struggling with identifying the basic criteria for selecting the right cloud provider for their business needs, security policies and compliance requirements. This whitepaper focuses on defining five key security-focused selection criteria to help you with this choice.