Forbes.com recently interviewed Knode in an article “Deciding Which Cloud Services To Trust.” In the article, Knode introduces six types of questions a business should ask any potential provider of cloud services, questions covering:

• History/Reputation
• Uptime
• Portability
• Authentication
• Compliance
• Privacy

These are the general categories that comprise two dozen questions making up the CloudTrust Protocol, a protocol he and others working on it believe will bring greater transparency to cloud computing services, and thus create the type of trust in cloud computing that, as Knode says, “puts us in the business of liberation.”

Knode has been working with CloudAudit.org (formerly the A6 group), and with the draft definitions and standards developed by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), to produce the CloudTrust Protocol. For example, if the latest recommendations of CloudAudit.org become a standard, the CloutTrust Protocol will be even easier to implement based on a foundation of some CloudAudit protocols and some existing (NIST) Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) results.

Knode says a test of the CloudTrust Protocol has been built and demonstrated, detailed semantics and syntax will soon be published, and an alpha release could even be available later this year.

“The pay-off has to be more than just saving money,” Knode said. “So, you have to be able to ’see inside.’ You have to be able to ask a cloud provider this set of questions. That’s how we reclaim transparency. If all we do with cloud is translate bogey-man stories from traditional data center operations, then we’ve missed a tremendous opportunity.”

Stay tuned for our next post in this week’s series on Cloud Security & Trust — we’ll talk with Matthew Moore, CSC’s Director of Global Security Solutions for the Americas.