Covering your *aaS - A security checklist for cloud models

If you ask three organizations how they are using the Cloud, you will get (at least) three answers. One may be considering using Google Apps for email, to avoid asking an admin to reboot mail servers at 4am to clear an email backlog. Another may be considering using Terramark or Amazon EC2 to spin up compute power to run processor-intensive work (like DNA sequencing, let's say). Another may be considering using Amazon's S3 as external storage. Here is where the *aaS model comes to the rescue. Cloud usage fits relatively neatly into the different categorizations of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

Using this categorization, I recently wrote a cloud security introduction for CSO Magazine which uses these categories: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, to show how security applies differently in each case. Check it out...