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Have you considered not outsourcing critical parts of your company to startups that are iterating fast and potentially breaking things? Could you share the reasoning behind Buffer choosing to store their customers' private data with MongoHQ, instead of your own secure infrastructure?

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This is the elephant in the room and I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned by any of the other comments.

When it comes to infrastructure as a service, it appears to me that there is an imbalance between the sensitivity of information entrusted to external systems on one hand, and the standards such systems are held up to on the other.

EDIT: case in point, on http://mongohq.com I can't find a single mention of the word "security". The language is all about ease of use, performance, scalability, disaster recovery, and low cost, but as far as I can tell not a single word is spent on what procedures are in place to safeguard your data from unwanted access.

EDIT: removed inflammatory comment.

"security" is always left for after-the-fact ---- exactly as evidenced by this disclosure and their poor in-house practices.

While I can see your point of view, and the grandparent's, let's be fair. These are startups in a rapidly evolving, highly competitive marketplace and they have limited resources. If they spent months triple checking every dotted i and crossed t they might never even launch, and there'd be no company.

Like everything in software it's about tradeoffs. Maybe they erred a little too far on one side of the curve, so let's learn from that. But it's unfair to expect startups to be in the same league as banks security-wise. Do you have any idea how much a good pentest costs?

I reject the tradeoff that your internal customer support 'impersonate user' web app would be available via simple password on the open internet.

As a founder of another startup (octocall.com) choosing to host our database with another company (postgres, hosted with Heroku) the decision is a simple one: You trade infrastructure management complexity for a monthly fee. Especially when you're starting out, the team is small, and time is much more expensive than whatever your database provider is charging you per month.

It's a great trade-off for most early-stage companies, because managing databases is hard. I'd rather leave it to the experts who specialize only in managing databases. You and your product team have a thousand and one other things to think about other than managing your database. Your provider may end up making mistakes, but that's part of the risk you take.

Security breaches are a mess for everyone involved, and we're in relatively new territory here in the Infrastructure As A Service space. Overall, I have little doubt that IAAS overall is a good thing. As an industry, we'll learn and improve on how to deal with all things "security", but we're clearly not there yet.

+1 Using Heroku Postgres as an example gets you a lot for free, e.g. WAL-E disaster recovery.

Also farming out a piece of infrastructure and having a secure stack doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

That's sort of a loaded question, no? A database is, in one way or another, critical to almost every business. I don't think that means every business should build one in house.

"The backdoor that was created through one of our partners, MongoHQ who are managing our database."

Looks like the database is managed by MongoHQ. That's what OP is talking about.

He's not talking about building the database, he's talking about hosting the database. And he's not claiming you shouldn't use third-party hosts, he's suggesting restraint in who you choose, in waiting for a track record to accumulate.

Security-after-the-fact is actually +EV just like certain risk distributions are +EV in finance. Companies must balance where they want to be in the secureness spectrum against the investment cost to get there and it seems that high grade security isn't worth the opportunity cost for a pretty big class of companies and customers.

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