Security Risk Assessment

DTGOV uses Microsoft Office 2010 as its office productivity suite and Microsoft Exchange 2010 for email. The DTGOV Exchange instance is running on a cluster of physical servers operating in one of the DTGOV data centres. The DTGOV Information Management Board (IMB), headed by the CIO, has decided to move its office productivity and email suites to a service based model and want to investigate the use of an SaaS office productivity and email suite.

The IMB want to study the use of either Google Docs and Gmail or Microsoft's Office 365 as a possible SaaS offering for DTGOV and its clients. This will be intended to replace the existing Exchange 2010 data centre infrastructure as well as the Office 2010 installation on all desktop computers.

You have been assigned the task of providing the IMB with both a Risk Management assessment and a Security assessment for this proposed migration. You are to:

Select either Google Docs/Gmail or Office 365 as the SaaS provider.

Provide an Information Security assessment on your chosen provider using the techniques proposed by Ramgovind et al, and the ASD Cloud Computing Security Considerations as your primary references. This assessment should be no more than 2 pages.

Provide a Risk Management assessment for your chosen provider using the Hickman and Beacroft, Threat and Risk Assessment Questionnaire V3 as a template.

Provide a covering one page executive summary to the IMB for these two documents and summarise the risk management and security benefits and drawbacks of the proposed migration of office productivity services to an SaaS model.

Rationale

This assessment will cover the following objectives:

Be able to compare and evaluate the ability of different Cloud Computing Architectures to meet a set of given business requirements;

Be able to evaluate a set of business requirements to determine suitability for a Cloud Computing delivery model;

Be able to evaluate and design an ICT Risk Management strategy for a Cloud Computing Delivery plan to meet business requirements;

Be able to interpret, evaluate and plan the Governance and Security requirements for a Cloud Computing delivery plan;

Be able to analyse and evaluate business requirements to plan a migration to a Cloud model;