Examkin

Question

Difficulty: EasyShared Responsibility Model

A company is deploying a fleet of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to host a new customer portal. According to the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, which of the following operational tasks is the sole responsibility of the customer?

  1. A
    Configuring and maintaining physical network hardware inside the AWS data center
  2. B
    Managing the virtualization hypervisor layer running on the physical host servers
  3. Patching and updating the guest operating system running on the EC2 instancesAnswer
  4. D
    Disposing of decommissioned storage media at the end of its lifecycle

Answer

Patching and updating the guest operating system running on the EC2 instances
Patching and updating the guest operating system is a customer responsibility under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model for EC2 instances. Because EC2 is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, AWS manages the physical host and hypervisor, but the customer retains full control and responsibility over the operating system, applications, and data configured on the instance.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the service type in the scenario.
Amazon EC2 is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resource.
The boundary of the Shared Responsibility Model depends on whether a service is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS).
2
Determine the boundary of responsibility for IaaS services.
For IaaS resources, the customer is responsible for the guest operating system and anything installed or configured on top of it, while AWS is responsible for the underlying infrastructure and physical facilities.
This division defines what falls under 'security in the cloud' (customer) versus 'security of the cloud' (AWS).
3
Evaluate the choices to locate a customer-managed operational task.
Patching the guest operating system is a customer responsibility, whereas physical hardware maintenance, hypervisor management, and media disposal are AWS responsibilities.
Operating system updates require administrative access to the instance, which only the customer possesses.

Key Concept

The customer is responsible for security 'in' the cloud (such as guest operating systems), while AWS is responsible for security 'of' the cloud (such as physical infrastructure and virtualization layers).
Estimated Time:45s
Rate this question

Topics

Shared Responsibility Model

More questions from this topic