Service Provider Insider

Defining Tenants In The SP Environment

I'm not one of those link-and-run blog posters, but occasionally I do make an exception.

Today's link comes to you from Edward Haletky who is starting to dive deep into the definitions -- from a legal perspective -- of the relationship between a service provider and their tenants.

In some regards, this is a follow-on to my previous post "Towards A Serious Discussion On Secure Multitenancy".

Right now, there's not a lot of firm legal ground and precedent to stand on in this area.  Edward (who also goes by @texiwill on Twitter) believes that some serious examination of this topic will be required before long.

Good reading over at http://www.virtualizationpractice.com

And, if you're a service provider, and you don't have an attorney starting to track these issues, perhaps you should :-)

Towards A Serious Discussion On Secure Multitenancy

This whole topic has been bubbling for a while as we consider fully virtualized (and inherently oversubscribed) pools of resources which will form the basis of so many service provider (cloud?) models going forward.

A small skirmish erupted when NetApp started promoting a solution they dubbed SMT -- secure multitenancy.  While there were aspects that did address some concerns around security (but not all), and some concerns around multitenancy (but not all), many of us felt it was being over-marketed in several regards.

Indeed, I saw a nasty take-down by @texiwill at GestaltIT's Field Day about the security aspects. I could do a similar take-down on the multitenancy aspects as well.

The purpose of this post isn't to slam any competitor, it's to drive towards two key discussion points -- (a) what is needed, and (b) how do SPs monetize it? 

And I don't think I can do all of this in one post.