I’ve been trialing cloud IaaS providers lately, and the frustration of getting through many of the sign-up processes has reminded me of some recurring conversations that I’ve had with service providers over the past few years.

Many cloud IaaS providers regard the fact that they don’t take online sign-ups as a point of pride — they’re not looking to serve single developers, they say. This is a business decision, which is worth examining separately (a future blog post, and I’ve already started writing a research note on why that attitude is problematic).

However, many cloud IaaS providers state their real reason for not taking online sign-ups, or of having long waiting periods to actually get an account provisioned (and silently dropping some sign-ups into a black hole, whether or not they’re actually legitimate), is that they’re trying to avoid the bad eggs — credit card fraud, botnets, scammers, spammers, whatever. Some cloud providers go so far as to insist that they have a “private cloud” because it’s not “open to the general public”. (I consider this lying to your prospects, by the way, and I think it’s unethical. “Marketing spin” shouldn’t be aimed at making prospects so dizzy they can’t figure out your double-talk. The industry uses NIST definitions, and customers assume NIST definitions, and “private” therefore implies “single-tenant”.)

But the thing that worries me is that cloud IaaS providers claim that vetting who signs up for their cloud, and ensuring that they’re “real businesses”, makes their public, multi-tenant cloud “safe”. It doesn’t. In fact, it can lure cloud providers into a false sense of complacency, assuming that there will be no bad actors within their cloud, which means that they do not take adequate measures to defend against bad actors who work for a customer — or against customer mistakes, and most importantly, against breaches of a customer’s security that result in bad eggs having access to their infrastructure.

Cloud providers tell me that folks like Amazon spend a ton of money and effort trying to deal with bad actors, since they get tons of them from online sign-ups, and that they themselves can’t do this, either for financial or technical reasons. Well, if you can’t do this, you are highly likely to also not have the appropriate alerting to see when your vaunted legitimate customers have been compromised by the bad guys and have gone rogue; and therefore to respond to it immediately and automatically to stop the behavior and thereby protect your infrastructure and customers; and to hopefully automatically, accurately, and consistently do the forensics for law enforcement afterwards. Because you don’t expect it to be a frequent problem, you don’t have the paranoid level of automatic and constant sweep-and-enforce that a provider like Amazon has to have.

And that should scare every enterprise customer who gets smugly told by a cloud provider that they’re safe, and no bad guys can get access to their platform because they don’t take credit-card sign-ups.

So if you’re a security-conscious company, considering use of multi-tenant cloud services, you should ask prospective service providers, “What are you doing to protect me from your other customers’ security problems, and what measures do you have in place to quickly and automatically detect and eliminate bad behavior?” — and don’t accept “we only accept upstanding citizens like yourself on our cloud, sir” as a valid answer.