This guest blog was contributed by Wendy Nather, Research Director, Enterprise Security Practice at The 451 Group. Her post comes on the heels of the highly anticipated launch of StillSecure’s Cloud SMS, and it provides some great context for the importance of security in the cloud. For more information about Cloud SMS, visit http://www.stillsecure.com and follow the latest updates on StillSecure’s blog, The Security Samurai.

If you’re a large enterprise, you’re in pretty good shape for the cloud: you know what kind of security you want and need, you have security staff who can validate what you’re getting from the provider, and you can hold up your end of the deal – since it takes both customer and provider working together to build a complete security program. Most of the security providers out there are building for you, because that’s where the money is; and they’re eager to work on scaling up to meet the requirements for your big business. If you want custom security clauses in a contract, chances are, you’ll get them.

But at the other end of the scale there are the cloud customers I refer to as being “below the security poverty line.” These are the small shops (like your doctor’s medical practice) that may not have an IT staff at all. These small businesses tend to be very dependent on third party providers, and when it comes to security, they have no way to know what they need. Do they really need DLP, a web application firewall, single sign-on, log management, and all the premium security bells and whistles? Even if you gave them a free appliance or a dedicated firewall VM, they wouldn’t know what to do with it or have anyone to run it.

And when a small business has only a couple of servers in a decommissioned restroom*, the provider may be able to move them to their cloud, but it may not be able to scale a security solution down far enough to make it simple to run and cost-effective for either side. This is the great challenge today: to make cloud security both effective and affordable, both above and below 10,000 feet, no matter whether you’re flying a jumbo airliner or a Cessna.

-Wendy Nather, The 451 Group

*True story. I had to run some there.