Betsy Nichols has joined the Common Assumance Metric group within the European Network and Information Security Agency.  The initial meeting was held in Barcelona on 15 March 2010 in conjunction with the Secure Cloud 2010 Conference sponsored by ENISA, CSA, IEEE, and ISACA.  The initiative seems to have the support of the major vendors (such as Microsoft, eBay, Google, Amazon Web Services) as well as other security groups (such as ISF, ISSA, and Jericho Forum).  The plan is to build on existing efforts such as Shared Assessments, CloudAudit, FTC, and NIST.  There are high expectations that something relevant, open, transparent and practical will be delievered within the next year.

In addition to providing a liason with the CSA Metrics Working Group, Betsy will be contributing in the area of models that compose and weight low level metrics to provide higher level assurance ratings for cloud based services.