Elastic cloud computing environments often reuse the same physical hardware for multiple customers over time as virtual machines are instantiated and deleted. This has important implications for…

Hardware integrity refers to whether the physical components are unmodified and trustworthy; reusing hardware for different customers does not inherently affect the physical integrity of the hardware.

When a VM is deleted, residual data may persist in memory, storage, or swap space on the underlying physical hardware. If that hardware is reassigned to a new tenant without secure data sanitization, the new tenant could potentially recover previous customer data. This is a well-known multi-tenancy risk in cloud environments specifically targeting confidentiality.

Availability concerns whether services are accessible when needed; reallocating hardware to a new VM tenant maintains or improves availability rather than threatening it.

Data integrity refers to the accuracy and consistency of data; the concern with hardware reuse is that old data could be read by unauthorized parties, which is a confidentiality issue, not an integrity issue.