Cloud providers like to boast about the safety and security of co-tenancy. Of course they would, it’s their business model, right? Virtustream (not to be confused with Virustream) says you will have “7x24x365 peace of mind” despite being in a shared space.

We draw from an extensive body of best practices to keep your cloud environment secure

That old “best practices” line is dangerous. No auditor worth his/her weight in RAM would ever be satisfied to hear those two words. Best for whom? Documented where? It means nothing on its own. Perhaps they could get away with stating that they are aligning with one or two or even a few best practices but “an extensive body” of cloud security practices? Show me this body. Where are they hiding it? A link, a contact, anything will do…

The following is one of the only clues they give their reader. Shared space is too dangerous to use:

Virtustream owns and maintains its own data centers, eliminating any concerns regarding others gaining physical access to the cloud platform you’re running on. The result: 7x24x365 peace of mind.

I find that an ironic marketing claim given their other statements about shared space.

In the physical world, where there is a huge body of knowledge approaching best practices for data centers, they do not want to share or use a co-tenancy model. Yet, in the logical world where there is still a lot of debate about what to do and how to do it…they stuff you in with everyone else.

Does the irony eliminate your concerns?

I wonder if they really believe that their datacenter is more secure than co-tenant datacenters. Let’s turn things around for a minute: a co-tenant datacenter has numerous clients frequently sending in different auditors. In theory a customer could actually end up with a higher level of security than in a single-tenant datacenter that gets only a single audit on an infrequent basis. The cloud advocate could argue that increasing the number of tenants increases the bar for security because the number of security assessments goes up, which forces a higher baseline.

This is not just speculation. I often find datacenters upgrading security controls because a new tenant has moved in that demands a higher-level of security than my clients would need. Armed guards, for example, are not a requirement for PCI but if someone from the DoD wants a rack…

If I give Virtuscan the benefit of the doubt, they probably meant to say that they can maintain a far higher level of security in a logical environment because the operational impact to them is lower than if they try to reach the same level of safety in a physical domain (e.g. they can handle segmentation with virtual systems at a nominal cost compared to the cages and cameras and doors required for physical security).

But right now their page says to me that cloud providers will come right out and admit they are spooked about shared space so they don’t use it, but they want you to feel comfortable because of “best practices” for shared space.