Comment by bix6
20 hours ago
Are hyperscalers actually more secure though? I have only heard anecdotal thinking eg nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.
20 hours ago
Are hyperscalers actually more secure though? I have only heard anecdotal thinking eg nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.
It’s the same thing: let’s say Microsoft or AWS got hacked. Then you’re definitely not the only one who got hacked.
So, you can always say: Look, it’s not us (especially not my org!). It f’ing Microsoft/AWS! Everyone got hacked.
You and your career are gonna be just fine.
In a prior role, we realized something similar with outages. For our particular product, we AWS went down - we went down. We freaked out the first time, but after it was done we realized not a single customer had inquired. This felt unusual since we were getting emails quickly if we have a self-inflicted outage.
Turns out, when a major provider went down all of our users were too busy fighting their own fires. When they do notice, it's on a day when ALL of their vendors are struggling so we don't get singled out as a bad apple.
The whole "No one gets fired for using IBM" analogy.
This is especially true if the majority of your customers are also on Microsoft/AWS/etc.
Literally 0 of your customers will notice that you are down if their own systems are also not working.
This is perfectly valid for many businesses, up to a (shockingly high) level.
LOL "if my competitors are all down too, then it's OK." I guess there's a bit of sense to that.
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Yeah, if Exchange goes down, you get a day off. If the little boutique email provider you chose goes offline, you get a day in calls with everyone yelling at you.
It's today's "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You're really just want the the SLA (someone to blame when things inevitably fail)
If you need deniability, sure.
But it you actually NEED security, it's clearly not an option.
Azure (and AWS) offer Gov clouds, and probably on prem air-gapped deployment of their full stack of Fabric for that type of NEED security customers who can pay for it.
It is trade-off between risk and access/productivity with a cost dimension always.
Depending on your threat model you could go to typewriters /paper as some Russian department did famously few years back too.
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Indeed.
If you want deniability no one should be doing business with you.
You are just describing how they're a more valuable target for an attack.
With a lot of PaaS type vendors you are effectively exposed to both the vendor themselves and the public cloud they run their stack on top of.
Broadly I think you're much more likely to be the victim of a platform-level breach involving an immature startup PaaS than a hyperscaler cloud, however I think for small teams the alternate risk you take on is that AWS/GCP/Azure are full of landmines and extremely easy to misconfigure in insecure ways if you don't know what you're doing. Especially if you have AI telling you confidently wrong things.
When I was at Microsoft we took security cripplingly seriously to the point we could not deliver features and our competitors could because the security process was convoluted and had multiple reviews and approval steps.
Having crippling bureaucracy does not correlate with good security outcomes, except maybe negatively. However, having a history of unending egregious security failures, like Microsoft, does correlate with poor security outcomes. For that matter, having a present of unending egregious security failures also correlates with poor security outcomes.
Let us look on the front page and see if there are any, oh look here is one: https://www.binarysecurity.no/posts/2026/10/one-root-case
Having crippling bureaucracy does have better correlation with security outcomes than the “move fast, break things” philosophy that most of the software industry lives by.
I’m not even blaming Zuck for that, he didn’t really invent it, though he certainly popularized it — he just made an astute observation of the dynamics in software and turned it into a company motto.
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the only reason you’re seeing this post is because of the large bug bounty program that actors like Northflank don’t even operate
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Practically every software security firm in the country was a vendor to Microsoft in the mid-late oughts and I know the Microsoft you're speaking about, but the vibe I've got lately is that things are different there now.
Tell me you weren’t on the Windows team without telling me you weren’t on the windows team :)
Unquestionably. They have top tier security operations that are well funded. They follow (or set) security best practices, they are audited, and they fix them quicker than you can. They have inside industry knowledge that is only shared among top organizations in this space, including government cyber ops. This gives them the ability to fix things before they are even publicly known.
You can get close if you have either:
1. the ability to spend hundreds of millions on security operations yourself
or 2. the ability to airgap the systems you are securing
> nobody ever got fired
thats the crux; are you working for the paycheck, or for the truth?
could be both, but pretty much all "i was right" stories start with "everyone else said i was wrong"
For me, the truth. I’d like the most secure provider possible. Which one is it though?
> Which one is it though
when i look for truth, if i dont find it myself through work, most people eager to hand it out had self-serving interests
security is proven through resilience? maybe. i guess i'd set up a box and try attacking it myself to know its secure. until someone else comes along and trips over it :)
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Yes and no. They (or anybody else) are not guaranteed to be secure, of course; see all the compromises regularly found in cloud providers; Azure especially has had so many cross-tenant vulnerabilities (there’s one on the front page right now!) that I’m amazed the concept of public multi-tenant clouds still exists.
But they are also very highly incentivized to be more secure. They have millions of customers (hence a correspondingly higher expectation of trust) and billions in revenue from the trillions in economic activity happening on those platforms (hence a correspondingly larger target on their backs.) This means exponentially higher liabilities. And that probably matters more than any other factor.
Adding on to it, even though they may be using AI as well. This could very well be a placebo and deniability factor but the fact remains that they have many many qualified employees and the chances of bugs passing through that are much less compared to other systems. Also it's that the systems are very severely pen-tested and have years of bugs removed out and the incentive of billions of dollars at stake that you mention that they have for the trust premium.
They will still make mistakes but they have the resources to make them less.
I doubt that such intense level of thorough testing can occur in a smaller company.
I still love small VPS providers and use them myself but it is worth knowing why enterprise is willing to pay a premium over those to these hyperscalers (it is a trust premium)