VIDEO: Rackspace CTO Tackles the Multi-Tenant Cloud Security Myth

the other general myth is that you know multi-tenancy public cloud is a security risk because of multi-tenancy um i know you have private cloud offerings and you just said you can wrap those controls around there but is the public multi-tenant cloud rackspace or otherwise general terms is it insecure no no i mean there's there we've always had multi-tenancy at some level um you know in a rackspace data center the core switching fabric is multi-tenant you know we all share the same switches the internet is a big multi-tenant network if you want to think about it depends on what scale you're willing to uh you know to think about multi-tenancy but but if you you get down to it um we're doing multi-tenancy all over the place and it and people embrace it in one and then on the other hand they they downplay it like it's the worst thing and it's really kind of i think at this point just more of lack of awareness or or fear and uncertainty and doubt and just uh you know years ago we used to be scared to put our credit card number in on a website and and now we do it without thinking twice and so i think it's just a matter of time before people start to shift their thinking a bit um but it's you know there's there's all kinds of workloads that are going on in the public cloud that are very secure and it's you know how you design your application um you know credit card companies get hacked all the time and it wasn't because they were in a multi-tenant cloud they were you know they were in hardened data centers with all the controls in the world and they still get they still get owned and so um i don't think it's because of multi-tenancy that that you're at risk then talking about security from a broader uh landscape what's the general direction within rackspace for security is it a is it a religion in the same sort of way that you know fanatical support is or does it take a you know bolt-on approach no it's inherent in everything we do it starts obviously with within our own uh practices our own policies our own procedures we've we've done a lot over i've been i've been at rackspace for 12 years and it's obviously security is a moving target and it's an evolving uh science as the guys out there in the in the world get you know more evil we have to get better at protecting ourselves and so we have evolved to the point where we have very serious internal security controls and policies procedures a lot of auditing going on all the time internally and you know you get your own house in order inside and then you start to allow that stuff to um spread into the customer environments as well you want to make sure your your customers are as as safe and as as protected as you can possibly make them given the level of control and and uh influence they have on their environment so we you know we protect our customers with sort of pre-built hardened um operating system images we shut things down by default we've locked things out of their firewall by by default and we sort of ask them to open things up as you know as limited as possible to protect them and to protect us and our other customers um you know it's it is certainly uh been inherent in everything we do we have security teams that work with the product teams on evaluating technologies evaluating code you know before we contribute code to the open source community we do a lot of code reviews and a lot of you know external third-party audits on our data centers we have an annual review cycle that just repeats itself over and over again you

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