For starters, why encrypt something literally in the same datacenter 6 feet away? Add significant latency and processing overhead.
Any communication between the cage and the outside world is through the cross-connects.
Unless it's some state-adversary, no one taps us like this. This is not a shared hosting. No one runs serious workloads like this.
"Unserious"? Sure, everything is encrypted p2p.
I'm not talking about someone plugging something in. I'm talking about someone pwning your VPN endpoint or firewall, and laterally moving from there. There's always a way to move around unless you are really, really careful (and even that is not enough if the adversary has an exploit for something really deep in the network stack).
At the very least, choose different vendors for your VPN/frontend firewall gear and the rest of your system. That way, an adversary can't just go and pwn every little piece of your network infrastructure with a single exploit.
I concede my point, thanks for that
It doesn't have to be one or the other. We've known for over a decade that the traffic between DCs was tapped https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-re... Extending that to intra-DC wouldn't be surprising at all.
Meanwhile backdoored chips and firmware attacks are a constant worry and shouldn't be discounted regardless of the first point.
Only a handful of people need to know what happens in Room 641A, and they're compelled or otherwise incentivized not to let anyone else know.
It might not be able to, if you use secure boot and your server is locked in a cage.