Coworking shouldn’t be limited to former factories with exposed brick and chunky wooden beams. Shared resources should also be leveraged in the cloud, particularly for early-stage startups with limited access to funds.

Sometimes referred to as multi-tenancy, sharing space in the cloud can give startups more development flexibility, but users need to manage expectations around security, reliability, scalability and serviceability.

“Networks underpinning a cloud deployment need a higher degree of automation, programmability and multi-tenancy versus traditional non-cloud buildouts,” Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President at Gartner, said in a blog post last year. “Further, there are multiple paths to achieving automation, programmability and multi-tenancy … it’s not SDN or bust.”

As regulations around data security evolve in an age of near-daily headlines about hacking, developers, founders, CTOs and CIOs need to know what the cloud coworking options are.

For more on this, learn about the four key design considerations for a multi-tenant cloud.

IBM Cloud Resources

Click here for a free IBM Bluemix trial.

To apply to the IBM Global Entrepreneur program, click here.