Today at the RSA Conference, Scott Charney, Corporate Vice President, Trustworthy Computing for Microsoft delivered a keynote focused on Enabling Greater Transparency and Control in the Cloud. Scott provides a summary of his keynote on the Official Microsoft Blog, where he announced some of the actions Microsoft is taking to provide our customers with more transparency and control, as well as some news as it relates to Azure, including:

• Several new forthcoming Azure services and partner solutions that integrate with Key Vault for encryption-at-rest, and securing passwords and other secrets. Since the preview of Key Vault in January, we have seen strong interest from customers and partners alike.
• Working with industry leaders like Barracuda, Check Point, Fortinet, Websense, Palo Alto Networks, F5 and Alert Logic to enable a variety of appliances such as load balancers, WAN optimizers and network security appliances in Azure.

This morning we also opened our Microsoft booth which includes a special Azure security partner pavilion. Exhibiting with us are three leading security partners, with ready solutions available in the Azure Marketplace:

• Barracuda Web Application Firewall inspects inbound web traffic and blocks attacks targeted at web applications.
• CloudLink SecureVM enables control when and where VMs boot, using VM volume encryption and pre-boot authorization with VM image integrity validation.
• Trend Micro Deep Security Platform delivers automated and highly scalable cloud security.

Today we’re also releasing a new 20-page white paper, Trusted Cloud: Microsoft Azure Security, Privacy, and Compliance. The paper describes the key points of the Azure approach to enabling trust:

Security. Microsoft makes security a priority at every step, from design and operations, to threat detection and mitigation, network isolation, data encryption, identity and access control.

Privacy and Control. Microsoft implements strong privacy protections in Azure services and makes a clear commitment through strong policies to provide customers with control over their data.

Transparency. Microsoft informs customer where data is stored, how it is secured, who can access it, and under what circumstances.

Compliance. Microsoft invests heavily in the development of robust and innovative  compliance processes.

Security, privacy, compliance, transparency, and control are all necessary for cloud computing customers to trust cloud services providers. With these elements in place through the right technologies and processes, customers can move to the cloud with confidence.