Why a neighborhood watch might be good for your credit union cloud strategy
by. Hugh Smallwood
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Won’t you be My Neighbor?
Let’s say you are out house hunting. What is one of the first criteria you apply? LOCATION. Do you want to live in the neighborhood with the highest levels of crime? Do you want to live in the neighborhood with the most registered sex offenders? Do you want to buy the house right next door to the local rowdy bar? Likely not…
Some of the things you do end up looking for are often related to who you are and what you do. You may be looking for a house near the good schools. Maybe you want a house close to your church. Maybe you have friends or family in a certain area and would like to be close.
Interestingly I do not always see people applying this logic to picking service providers… specifically cloud providers. To me, it makes sense. When looking at the architecture of most people’s multitennancy environments, often times there is increased risk from other client’s on the platform. Providers spend most of their time securing themselves form outside threats often times leaving lateral (client to client) threats less protected.
In these scenarios it is always best to “know your neighbor”. In many cloud situations this is hard to determine. Just one short IP block away could be a radicle social group who believes in eating baby seals for breakfast. This makes them an instant target for attackers and has a spill over threat to you. Often people suffering from service outages due to attacks where they are not the ultimate target. They get caught in the cross fire. Fact, if you move into a high crime neighborhood you are more likely to get robbed!
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