1/ Following up on my earlier outage comment, the thread I'd meant to start: Cloud risk and resilience is a topic of significant enterprise interest now. Lots of reasons for that, not the least of which is the normalization of mission-critical cloud workloads.
2/ High-profile outages this year haven't helped: Azure AD (bit.ly/3nRSREF). Akamai (bit.ly/3CAjSk8 - often taken for granted as bulletproof). The recent recurring IBM issues (bit.ly/2VYfxY6).
3/ But I push back on the notion that cloud is just someone else's computers. Cloud, especially at massive scale, is a highly complex software system. See how.complexsystems.fail - It doesn't fail the way that hosting fails.
4/ As humans, we are really bad at figuring out the risk of complex systems, especially because the good ones are heavily defended against failure.
5/ And each time there's a failure, a thousand outraged voices cry out, "How could they let this happen?" (This is why post-incident public RCAs are so important. AWS Azure GCP OCI all do this. These provide transparency into due care.)
6/ This applies to security too. It's been a bad week for @Azure, with three significant vulnerability disclosures. That public transparency is also critical, even if it raises exploit risks. (Patch your #omigod vulnerable servers, please, folks!)
7/ Cloud requires customers to trust what they don't control. Public transparency into outage status, RCAs, and relentless self-examination in the drive to do better is vital. If you are a cloud provider (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS), this ought to be a minimum expectation.
8/ The enterprise is waking up to all the critical dependencies that they might never have thought about and have now realized they might need to actively risk-manage. Sometimes, this will lead to better, more thoughtful architectures.
9/ But much of the time it's going to be "You need to trust your provider to do a good job" (and dual-sourcing is complex and expensive), coupled with, "Only use the providers you can trust."
10/ While customers don't intellectually expect perfection, it is an *emotional* expectation. They want cloud to be magical, because it ISN'T just someone else's computer. (We also know planes can crash, and yet we don't ever expect them to fall out of the sky.)
11/ The promise "It will get better" DOES work for a while, though it eventually wears thin if a provider's test people's patience too long or some overzealous salespeople convince too many people it's magically available.
12/ But we're now very much in an era where people are asking, "What went wrong *and what should we do about it*?" rather than throwing up their hands helplessly. New market threat and opportunity! (New research notes forthcoming from me!) Your feedback? /fin

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More from @cloudpundit

22 Sep
1/ Another thread on cloud risk. Years ago, my colleague @JayHeiser1 divided cloud providers into three "tiers". Tier 1 - the largest leaders, generally cloud-native. Tier 2A - significant usually cloud-native providers. Tier 2B - large vendors cloudifying. Tier 3 - Everyone else
2/ We used this hierarchy, for instance, in the cloud IaaS MQ, as a shortcut for relative risk. Tier 1 can probably be assumed to be investing very deeply in risk reduction, with a presumption of competence. They are also gold mines for attackers, so *need* that competence.
3/ Tier 2 is somewhat riskier but is where customers can influence the most. Tier 2A might not be resourcing risk reduction as deeply. Tier 2B ditto, especially if they're not thinking cloud-natively. Customers can influence, and negotiate more contractual concessions.
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