Customers need to realize that the type of cloud service they buy has an impact on how much responsibility they have for directly providing security and management of their data and applications, the report says. "The key takeaway for security architecture is that the lower down the stack the cloud service provider stops, the more security capabilities and management consumers are responsible for implementing and managing themselves," the report says.

For instance, Amazon's EC2 infrastructure as a service addresses physical, environmental and virtualization security but not security of virtual instances, operating systems, applications and the data itself. With SaaS such as Salesforce.com's CRM offering, the provider is responsible for securing everything including the application and data.

Businesses must fully understand providers' security measures or run the risk of endangering their data. "Unless cloud providers can readily disclose their security controls and the extent to which they are implemented to the consumer, and the consumer knows which controls are needed to maintain the security of their information, there is tremendous potential for misguided decisions and detrimental outcomes," the report says.

In general, potential users of cloud services need to do a risk assessment that takes into account the importance of data to a business and the security that providers can provably deliver, the report says. "As with any security area, organizations should adopt a risk-based approach to moving to the cloud and selecting security options," the report says.

To do that the report recommends the following steps: