Skyhigh approves 50 CSPs as `enterprise ready’

For many users, finding some objective measure of the efficacy and reliability of a service provider to do the work the user wants without major problems or (potentially expensive) aggravations is an important step. In the UK, for example, one thinks of the certification programme run by the Cloud Industry Forum.

Providing such objective assessments is also the goal of Skyhigh Networks, which has justannounced this week that more than 50 cloud service providers (CSPs) have now been rated `Skyhigh Enterprise-Ready’ by the company and have joined the Skyhigh CloudTrust Program since its launch in January 2014.

Skyhigh evaluates thousands of CSPs and grants the Skyhigh Enterprise-Ready seal only to those CSPs which fully satisfy the most stringent requirements for data protection, identity verification, service security, business practices, and legal protection. The Skyhigh CloudTrust Program is an objective, comprehensive, and free program available to all CSPs including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers.

Selecting the right cloud services is critical, and performing product evaluations is expensive and time consuming, especially with the breadth of services available today and with the fast-changing security capabilities and vulnerabilities of each of the thousands of CSPs. Organisations use the Skyhigh CloudTrust rating to streamline cloud adoption while mitigating risk within their organisation.

More than 30 categories are represented in the program including business intelligence, cloud infrastructure, cloud storage, collaboration, customer relationship management, development, ecommerce, finance, human resources, IT services, legal, marketing, networking, and service desk and support. 

“We found that our employees were using multiple file-sharing services and that many of these services posed a risk to the organisation,” said Brian Lillie, CIO of Equinix. “We selected the most popular service rated Skyhigh Enterprise-Ready which was the obvious choice from both a productivity and security standpoint. The CloudTrust rating reduced a process that takes months down to a few hours.”

More and more cloud services are focusing on the enterprise market to drive revenue. As a result, enterprise-focused services often have to compete with consumer-focused services which are in the same category but which do not provide the same level of security capabilities to meet privacy, security and compliance standards required in the enterprise. The challenge for organisations is to determine which services to approve for employee use.

As a completely objective rating assessment, the Skyhigh CloudTrust program differentiates Enterprise-Ready services from high-risk services so that organisations can quickly adopt the cloud services that not only are in demand from their employees, but that also meet the enterprises’ security, compliance and governance requirements.

“The use of cloud services is often not approved because there is a feeling that cloud service security is insufficient universally,” said Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh Networks. "While security is lacking for many cloud services, seven percent of cloud service providers have invested time and resources in developing services that adhere to rigorous enterprise security requirements. We started the Skyhigh CloudTrust program to highlight these services and ease the cloud adoption lifecycle for CIOs and IT departments.”