6 ms·
That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.
by rrdharan 4y ago
That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.
- brightball 4y agoAt the time, I thought it was pretty cool. IIRC part of the pitch and the cost was that they were literally supplementing your IT department with the same types of agreements you'd have for an outsourced IT provider.
- debarshri 4y agoYou will be surprised how much digitalocean has access in your cloud infra. We had a support ticket, the support person could see all our pods, namespace and kubernetes objects, disk mounts etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- julianlam 4y agoHow is that a surprise? They quite literally have physical access to your VPS (even if not easily). All the things you mentioned are simple metadata available via query. If things went really sideways on one of my servers, and I could not manage to get back in (even with their 3-4 alternative methods), I fully expect DigitalOcean to be able to log in and restore access, and charge me for the privilege.
- debarshri 4y agoQuestion is how would you know the support engineer who has access to your stuff and can log you in is not a bad actor.
- Hippocrates 4y agoSeems like it's the default that employees have privileged access like this unless it is explicitly designed out of the system. It's hard to do that even in domains much simpler than a cloud.
- bravetraveler 4y agoManaged services, managed access
- rrdharan 4y agoUnsolicited direct inspection of customer content is what’s surprising. I know we don’t have homeomorphic encryption, but typically policies (requiring explicit user request / Consent) would be in place even if they can’t be sufficiently enforced with current technology. The whole thing reminds me of that Azure LinkedIn thing (where someone was contacted on LinkedIn by a Microsoft PM based on their azure activity).
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoIt was pretty normal in that space. Good MSPs proactively monitored their customers servers for issues. I certainly would have sent a wall message if I saw the customer was on the machine.
- bravetraveler 4y agoUnderstandably so! There is a relationship that I find difficult to explain here. For a managed service provider, we were there mainly for the operating system. If told about particular services, those too. To tend to that, we had to maintain more access than what common convention today tells us should be comfortable. It's really sold as "an extension (or replacement) for your IT department" We would do everything we could to avoid going even remotely near the data, but it does depend on a bit of 'trust us' There were varying degrees to it, too. Some customers would get notified if we even pulled their IP addresses, others only if we logged in, some if we escalated privileges at all. Like the peer comment from TheHappyOddish mentions, sending a wall message to folks logged in was a sort of common courtesy; chances are we're both in here for the same reason.
- acdha 4y agoOne thing to remember is that norms changed over time. In the 90s and 2000s it was pretty widely accepted that a sysadmin could access customer data pretty easily and that trust was basically factored into the relationship. Over time and various scandals our expectations have changed but there's definitely a generational divide here.
- bravetraveler 4y agoNot to detract from the paradigm shift, it is very true... but this is also more of an 'upsell' now. Providers generally don't want this access, but they'll accept it - and your money
- acdha 4y agoIt's a compliance requirement in certain fields, too, so someone asking for it is a reliable way to tell that they're probably less cost-discriminatory.
- bravetraveler 4y agoFair point! I should have realized this was relevant and included it... that's been eating a fair bit of our time lately.
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoHave they changed? I assume Amazon, Google and Microsoft all could enter any "instance" (VPS) they choose or simply clone the disk.