Whose Job Was It to Prevent?

About this interactive

The shared responsibility model divides the security of a hosted service between you, the customer, and the provider. The Cloud Hosting Considerations lesson shows the line moving up the stack. Colocation: you rent space in the provider's data center. The provider secures the building, power and cooling; every server, switch and setting in your rack is yours. IaaS: the provider also runs the network, storage, servers and virtualization (the hypervisor). You choose the operating system and secure it, along with the middleware, runtime, applications and data. PaaS: the provider also runs the operating system, middleware and runtime. You bring your application and data; in the lesson's WordPress hosting example, your pages and the plugins you add are yours. SaaS: the provider runs nearly everything, including the application itself. You still own the data you put in, the accounts you create, and how you set the service up, such as who can sign in and what they can share. The lesson notes the line is not always clean: a provider can share part of a layer, such as some operating system security in IaaS. The cards stay with the usual split. A quick test for each card: in this model, is the thing that failed below the line (the provider's) or above it (yours)? Your data, your accounts and your own code are always above it.

What you'll learn

Apply the shared responsibility model to something that went wrong: decide whether preventing it was the customer's job or the provider's, in colocation, IaaS, PaaS or SaaS
Recognize that the customer keeps its own data, accounts and code in every model, while the provider's share grows from the building in colocation to the whole application in SaaS

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.1 Compare and contrast security implications of different architecture models.

NIST 800-53

SA-9 External System Services.

Key terms

Shared Responsibility Model: A framework that defines how security responsibilities are divided between a cloud service provider and its customers across different service and deployment models.
Infrastructure as a Service: A cloud service model that provides virtualized computing infrastructure over the internet.
Platform as a Service: A cloud service model that provides a platform for developing, running, and managing applications without managing infrastructure.
Software as a Service: A cloud service model that delivers software applications over the internet on a subscription basis.
Colocation: A data center model in which an organization rents physical space, power, cooling, and network connectivity from a third-party facility while retaining ownership of its own servers and equipment.

Topics

Cloud Shared Responsibility Interactive Streak Sort

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