As sensitive workloads move to the cloud, one issue has become unavoidable: multi-tenancy is a security liability. Research and recent breaches show that even top platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) can’t fully prevent cross-tenant risks at layers like compute, orchestration, and especially storage. Logical isolation—encryption, IAM, segmentation—helps, but it doesn’t remove the underlying reality of shared infrastructure. For regulated industries in finance, healthcare, defense, or AI, that exposure is unacceptable.
The solution is single-tenant architecture, starting with storage. By eliminating shared arrays and metadata services, enterprises gain provable data isolation, audit-ready transparency, and reduced compliance risk—without abandoning cloud agility.
Volumez enables this shift with dedicated NVMe-backed storage inside a customer’s VPC, ensuring full separation and verifiable control. The outcome is clear: secure workloads, simplified compliance, and restored trust in cloud infrastructure.
Why physical separation is becoming essential for secure cloud architecture
As organizations move increasingly sensitive workloads to the cloud, a fundamental question has become urgent: are the cost and convenience of shared infrastructure worth the security trade-offs?
For years, the answer seemed to be yes. Cloud providers delivered speed, elasticity, and economies of scale through multi-tenancy, stacking many customers onto the same hardware while promising strong logical isolation. But mounting evidence now shows that shared infrastructure isn’t just a performance bottleneck or reliability issue. It’s a serious security risk, and one that organizations in regulated and high-stakes industries can no longer ignore.
The growing risks of multi-tenancy
Security has always been central to cloud adoption. Yet in today’s environment, risks tied to multi-tenancy, data privacy, compliance, and lack of control have become the most significant barrier to further cloud expansion.
A 2024 CIO report revealed that nearly 80% of AI governance risks remain unaddressed, mainly because companies lack visibility into where their data resides and who shares the infrastructure beneath it. In industries such as finance, healthcare, AI/ML, and defense, that lack of certainty is unacceptable.
These are not theoretical risks. They’re real, growing, and increasingly documented.
Research confirms the threat
Academic research over the last two years has made one thing clear: no major cloud platform is immune to the vulnerabilities of multi-tenancy.
A 2025 survey from MIT World Peace University reviewed dozens of studies into shared infrastructure and concluded that even the largest platforms, AWS, Azure, and GCP, face unfixable risks. One notable example came from Zhao et al., presented at ASPLOS 2024, which demonstrated a cross-tenant cache side-channel attack in Google Cloud Run that successfully recovered critical cryptographic nonce values.
Other studies have shown that modern orchestration platforms can be tricked into high-rate co-residency detection, and that shared physical resources such as CPU caches, memory, and interconnects can leak information across tenants. The conclusion is stark: logical isolation is no longer enough.
Storage: The silent weak spot
Of all the shared layers, storage may be the most vulnerable — and the hardest to secure.
Recent research has shown how remnants of previous tenants’ data can persist when disks are reallocated, how attackers can infer activity by analyzing I/O timing patterns, and how snapshot or metadata leakage can reveal usage details. Even with encryption and IAM controls, cloud-native storage services like EBS and Managed Disks ultimately depend on shared arrays, shared metadata services, and shared control planes.
When your data lives on the same backend as dozens of other tenants, the attack surface isn’t theoretical. It’s built into the design.
Real-world breaches prove the point
The last few years have provided painful confirmation of these risks:
- ChaosDB (Azure Cosmos DB): A misconfiguration allowed attackers to gain access to primary keys across accounts.
- AT&T / Snowflake (2024): A shared platform breach exposed 110 million customer records across multiple organizations.
- BingBang (Azure AD): A misconfiguration in Microsoft’s multi-tenant environment lets attackers manipulate core applications.
- GCP Cloud SQL (2023): A vulnerability allowed a low-privileged user to escalate to full sysadmin and access internal secrets, exposing the risks of multi-tenant managed services.
- AWS Shadow Resources (Aqua Security): Exposed hidden infrastructure leaking data across accounts.
- CVE-2019-5736: A container escape attack that allowed access to host storage and neighboring workloads.
In every case, the shared nature of the underlying infrastructure was the common denominator.
The high cost of breaches
When risks are baked into infrastructure you don’t control, the fallout is massive.
Regulatory fines can be devastating, up to €20 million or 4% of global revenue under GDPR, or $1.5 million per HIPAA violation. The IBM 2024 report pegged the average breach cost at $4.9 million, not counting reputational damage, customer churn, or compliance delays.
Perhaps more damaging than the fines themselves is the loss of trust. Customers and regulators alike are increasingly aware of the invisible risks of shared environments. Even the perception of multi-tenant exposure can cost an enterprise business.
Why traditional security falls short
Cloud providers are not blind to these issues. They offer encryption at rest, IAM frameworks, network segmentation, and an array of compliance certifications.
But these protections all have one thing in common: they’re based on logical isolation. Beneath it, customers still share control planes, storage controllers, metadata services, and physical arrays. For routine workloads, that may be acceptable. For sensitive workloads, it is not.
As one researcher put it at ASPLOS 2024: “No single solution is sufficient. Multiple layers of defense are required, and even then, shared infrastructure remains a root vulnerability.”
The shift toward single-tenant security
Faced with these realities, many organizations are conducting risk-based assessments to determine where multi-tenancy becomes unacceptable.
High-risk workloads such as patient health records, financial transactions, or AI/ML training datasets increasingly demand zero shared infrastructure exposure. Medium-risk workloads may tolerate shared platforms with strong oversight, while low-risk use cases like public-facing web content can continue on native services.
This shift doesn’t require abandoning the cloud. It simply means isolating what matters most, beginning with storage.
A practical adoption path
The journey toward stronger security doesn’t have to disrupt existing operations. Enterprises are incrementally isolating their most sensitive workloads while keeping their cloud-native workflows intact.
Databases, PHI repositories, financial systems, or AI pipelines can move first. Existing DevOps tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines continue to work. Teams don’t need new skill sets or workflows; they gain the guarantee that critical data never shares backends with untrusted neighbors.
Introducing Volumez: Security-first storage by design
Volumez was built to eliminate multi-tenancy risk at its root by delivering true single-tenant storage directly inside your cloud account.
Instead of relying on shared disk arrays or metadata services, Volumez provisions dedicated NVMe-backed storage within your VPC. All operations happen in a fully isolated data plane. Metadata allocation is separate, I/O pathways are encrypted, and full audit transparency gives you verifiable proof of data residency.
Need even more control? Volumez can run in a hyperconverged configuration on bare-metal instances, combining compute and storage in a fully single-tenant design, ideal for trading systems, regulated databases, healthcare workloads, or AI/ML training.
The outcome is straightforward: when you eliminate shared infrastructure, you eliminate shared risk.
Proven results
Organizations that have adopted Volumez for sensitive workloads report a consistent outcome: confidence in isolation.
CISOs and compliance officers gain clear evidence of data residency and hardware separation, dramatically reducing audit friction. Security teams can assure executives and regulators that critical workloads are protected from noisy neighbors and backend leaks.
As one global financial institution’s CISO put it: “Volumez gave us the proof of isolation we could never achieve with traditional cloud storage. For the first time, we can show regulators exactly where our data lives and who doesn’t have access to it.”
Final takeaways
The cloud’s biggest bottleneck today isn’t IOPS or bandwidth. It’s security.
Multi-tenancy amplifies risk at every shared layer, with storage the weakest link. Logical isolation is no longer enough; sensitive workloads demand provable guarantees of separation.
Single-tenant storage closes the gap, eliminating cross-tenant risk and delivering the audit trail regulators require.
Call to action
Ready to eliminate multi-tenancy risk?
Read the HA policy framework blog on how Volumez provides native multi-zone storage resilience without shared infrastructure. Read the customer case study blog on how a technology leader achieved zero data loss and rapid failover with Volumez block-level mirroring, while saving $400K per deployment. Explore our Oracle solution.
Book a no-cost security risk assessment today and see how single-tenant storage can safeguard your most critical workloads.