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Despite the clear economic benefits of using cloud services, concerns about security, compliance and data privacy have slowed down enterprise adoption. In most recent surveys for Cloud services, security remains the number one issue. The key security concerns from customers’ viewpoint are around security defects in the technology itself, unauthorized access to customer information, encryption, application security, identity management, and virtualization security.

As Mark Fowle, CEO, Attenda explains, “Responsibility for security will depend upon the cloud offering and provider. For Infrastructure as a Service, typically vendor responsibility is around physical, environmental, and virtualization security; but every other aspect of security in applications, operating system and so on still needs to be handled. It is essential to carry out proper due diligence with your cloud providers, ensuring that you ask the right questions and you really understand their service level agreement, to select the right provider, based on your requirements and risk appetite.”

Attenda places security at the forefront of its critical applications hosting and cloud services; supported by ISO 9001 Quality Management, ISO 20000 Service Management and ISO 27001 Information Security accreditations, together with numerous other industry and vendor certifications. It is helping its clients to transition to business-centric cloud computing, building upon its pedigree in highly secure, highly available and high performance critical applications managed services, providing enterprise class security and data privacy, with security policies and processes that embrace governance, compliance and audit, information lifecycle management and operational security. Additionally, for applications with specific compliance requirements, such as ecommerce applications, Attenda supports its clients through its own PCI DSS audits and additional services to assist with their compliance requirements.

He adds, “During 2012 we will be working toward introducing new capabilities and offerings that will drive us closer to the goal of providing a suite of modular security services that address the full spectrum of cloud services from simple self-managed virtual machines and single solution cloud services through to multiple clouds from different providers with the capability to manage security policies and processes across multiple operators, each with different infrastructures, operational policies and security skills, to alleviate security concerns in cloud and hybrid hosting environments.”

To reinforce Attenda’s Security Strategy, Matt Gordon-Smith has been appointed as Attenda’s Director of Security, with responsibility for all areas of security within the business, from its data centres, to the standards built into Attenda’s platforms, services and client solutions. Matt is a seasoned senior security leader with experience across many IT managed services and outsourcing companies including IBM, Siemens, Verizon Business and Savvis. Matt has experience in many different facets of security, across various industry sectors and working closely with clients to address their individual security needs.

Commenting on the appointment, CEO of Attenda, Mark Fowle, said: “We are delighted to welcome Matt to his new role, and regard his appointment as a vital addition to our Leadership Team. Matt joins at an exciting phase for the organisation, as we aim to boost our capabilities to ensure we continue to deliver services that make a real difference to our clients’. He brings huge experience and industry know-how which will play a key role in the future growth of Attenda.”

The new appointment comes at a time of continued growth for the organisation and means that Attenda is well placed to continue to expand its range of services; in August 2011, Darwin Private Equity completed the management buyout of Attenda. Since it was established in 1997 Attenda has grown to over 200 staff and has a strong track record of year on year revenue growth - compound growth of 16% over the last 5 years.