Provider Responsibilities

Provider-owned infrastructure responsibilities are the part of the model that many teams understand first and analyze least. Physical security, backbone networking, host fleet operations, virtualization layers, and managed-service platform operations are usually on the provider side of the line. That does not make them irrelevant to the customer. It changes how the customer inherits, verifies, and depends on them.

This chapter makes that inherited layer concrete. The lessons walk from facilities and hardware to the backbone and foundational services, then into the host and virtualization plane, and finally into managed platform operations. The point is not to memorize provider tasks. It is to understand which controls the customer can rely on directly, which ones require evidence rather than configuration, and which ones still leave customer-side decisions exposed.

Read This Chapter With Three Ideas In Mind

• inherited controls reduce duplicated work but do not remove the need to understand scope and limits
• provider operation is not the same as provider accountability for customer-specific outcomes
• the stronger the provider layer is, the more tempting it becomes to stop asking boundary questions too early

Use this chapter when you need to separate genuine inherited protection from wishful thinking about what the provider probably covers.

In this section

• Physical Security, Facilities, and Hardware
  Physical security, facilities, and hardware sit on the provider side of the shared responsibility model in nearly every mainstream cloud service.
• Core Network Backbone and Foundational Services
  Core network backbone and foundational services are another major provider-owned layer.
• Virtualization and Underlying Host Infrastructure
  Virtualization and underlying host infrastructure are at the heart of what many providers mean by "security of the cloud."
• Managed Service Platform Operations
  Managed service platform operations are where provider responsibility becomes more visible to customers.