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Difficulty: EasyCompliance and Governance

An online retail company is auditing its cloud deployment to verify compliance with industry security standards. Under the AWS shared responsibility model, which of the following operational tasks is the sole responsibility of the customer?

  1. Patching the guest operating system and configuring security groups on Amazon EC2 instancesAnswer
  2. B
    Disposing of decommissioned physical storage devices that contain customer data
  3. C
    Upgrading the firmware of the physical network switches inside AWS data centers
  4. D
    Patching the virtualization hypervisor layer running the host servers

Answer

Patching the guest operating system and configuring security groups on Amazon EC2 instances
The task of patching the guest operating system and configuring security groups on Amazon EC2 instances is a customer responsibility under the shared responsibility model. Because customers launch and manage their own EC2 instances, they have full control over the guest operating system and its network access control settings, making it security 'in' the cloud.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the boundary of responsibility under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.
AWS is responsible for security 'of' the cloud (infrastructure, physical security, virtualization), while the customer is responsible for security 'in' the cloud (data, guest OS, network configuration).
This distinction determines which operational task belongs to the customer.
2
Evaluate the options against the customer responsibility boundary.
Managing guest operating systems and local firewall configurations (security groups) on EC2 instances falls under security 'in' the cloud.
Because the customer has direct control and access to the guest OS of EC2 instances, AWS cannot manage these configurations for them.

Key Concept

Shared Responsibility Model for Compliance
Estimated Time:45s
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Topics

Compliance and Governance

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