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Cloud Security · 4 min

Shared Responsibility Model

Who secures what — and why it depends

This lesson explains the concept, then checks your understanding in a short interactive exercise.

Two sides of one line

Providers secure the infrastructure they operate. Customers secure what they put into it and how they configure it.

  • Provider — physical facilities, hardware, hypervisor, managed service internals
  • Customer — identities, permissions, configuration, data, application code

The boundary is service-specific

There is no single universal diagram. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud describe responsibility differently, and it varies between services within the same provider — a managed database splits differently than a virtual machine. Read the specific service documentation and contract rather than assuming.

  • "The provider handles security" — false
  • "The customer owns everything" — also false
  • Contracts and service tiers change the boundary

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