Comment by baxtr
20 hours ago
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.
I didn’t say competitors; I said customers.
If none of your customers are up to call your service, it does not matter if your service is up or down.
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.
I setup parts of govcloud.
The real sensitive customers are on oxide.
1 reply →
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.