Justice League Blog
Bubbles
I’ve lived in a bubble all of my life. My parents created a bubble to grow up in and then I wrote commercial software products. It’s only recently that I’ve stepped out of that bubble and seen just how messy the real world is. Yes, I’ve looked at bubbles from both sides now (sorry, but I couldn’t resist the not so veiled reference to Joni Mitchell).
Application software lives in a bubble too. Quite literally, the bubble itself are all of the network security controls, but there’s also all of that airspace inside. That air space is the set of invisible assumptions that the software is built on.
One of the assumptions that’s been on the top of my mind is “our software runs behind the firewall”. This isn’t an indictment of this statement, it’s true and there’s a wonderful, liberating set of assumptions that a designer can make. Where do those assumptions materialize in software development artifacts? For many of them, the answer is nowhere. They are passed on through the airspace because everyone knows them. There’s no need to write them down.
What assumptions exist in the security of an application when it gets ported to a cloud computing environment? Multi-tenant versus Single-tenant infrastructure – check. Externalization of IAM for SSO – check. The 20 other “well duh” generic security items that pundits (myself included) will dwell and pontificate on. What are the important ones? Damned if I know.
But you know and only you will know. Why? Because you’re inside the bubble and we’re not. So, start writing them down. And when I come in a pull out my generic (I called tried and true) solution for migrating to the cloud pull out that list. It’s that list of assumptions that stand between you and migrating your application to a the cloud.
