I recently released the first and second installments of a six-part blog series about what it takes to have an enterprise-ready cloud service. While the identity hack of Wired’s Mat Honan (and the media fallout that followed) spurred the idea, the focus is on the three characteristics that differentiate an enterprise-grade cloud service from a typical consumer cloud service: security, reliability and trust. So, what makes services like Box, ServiceNow, salesforce.com, and Okta enterprise clouds? As I outlined in my first post, there are five categories to look at when evaluating a cloud service for security, reliability and trustworthiness. Development for the enterprise Endless 9s reliability Benchmarked and audited service Strong encryption throughout Singular focus on the customer I am going to fast-forward a bit to discuss the “benchmarked and audited service” category in this post. In a classical sense, this means achieving a compliance certification by a trusted independent.