Overview of the shared responsibility model

The shared responsibility model is a concept relating to the delineation of responsibility when someone adopts a cloud solution. Depending on the solution and its architecture, a cloud provider will take ownership of ensuring the security up to a certain level of the technology stack, beyond which the customer is responsible. It defines a set of responsibilities to be designated across portions of the stack. These responsibilities include the hardware, boot, hardened kernel and inter-process communication (IPC), storage and encryption, network, audit logging, operating systems and logging, network security, access and authentication, operations, identity, web application security, deployment, usage, access policy, and content/data.

If an organization is running its infrastructure on premises within its own data centers, it is responsible for everything. It must procure the hardware and software, ensure it is hardened and patched, manage...