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Shared responsibility in the cloud

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As you consider and evaluate public cloud services, it's critical to understand the shared responsibility model and which security tasks the cloud provider handles and which tasks you handle. The workload responsibilities vary depending on whether the workload is hosted on Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or in an on-premises datacenter.

Division of responsibility

In an on-premises datacenter, you own the whole stack. As you move to the cloud some responsibilities transfer to Microsoft. The following diagram illustrates the areas of responsibility between you and Microsoft, according to the type of deployment of your stack.

Diagram showing responsibility zones.

For all cloud deployment types, you own your data and identities. You're responsible for protecting the security of your data and identities, on-premises resources, and the cloud components you control. Cloud components you control vary by service type.

Regardless of the type of deployment, you always retain the following responsibilities:

  • Data
  • Endpoints
  • Account
  • Access management

Cloud security advantages

The cloud offers significant advantages for solving long standing information security challenges. In an on-premises environment, organizations likely have unmet responsibilities and limited resources available to invest in security, which creates an environment where attackers are able to exploit vulnerabilities at all layers.

The following diagram shows a traditional approach where many security responsibilities are unmet due to limited resources. In the cloud-enabled approach, you're able to shift day to day security responsibilities to your cloud provider and reallocate your resources.

Diagram showing security advantages of cloud era.

In the cloud-enabled approach, you're also able to apply cloud-based security capabilities for more effectiveness and use cloud intelligence to improve your threat detection and response time. By shifting responsibilities to the cloud provider, organizations can get more security coverage, which enables them to reallocate security resources and budget to other business priorities.

Next step

Learn more about shared responsibility and strategies to improve your security posture in the Well-Architected Framework's overview of the security pillar.