Examkin

Question

Difficulty: MediumCompliance and Governance

A financial institution deploying a payment processing application on AWS wants to ensure compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, which compliance-related task is the sole responsibility of the customer?

  1. A
    Securing the physical data center facilities and hardware host components.
  2. B
    Patching the virtualization hypervisor software that hosts the EC2 instances.
  3. Configuring data encryption at rest and in transit within the payment application.Answer
  4. D
    Scheduling a physical security audit of AWS data centers by the customer's internal compliance team.

Answer

Configuring data encryption at rest and in transit within the payment application.
Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS is responsible for 'security of the cloud,' which includes the physical infrastructure, hardware, and hypervisor virtualization layer. The customer is responsible for 'security in the cloud,' which includes customer data encryption, firewall configuration, and application-level security settings. Therefore, configuring encryption for cardholder data within the application is the customer's sole responsibility.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the Shared Responsibility Model boundaries for a PCI-DSS compliance scenario.
Identify that physical security (data centers) and infrastructure maintenance (hypervisor patching) belong to AWS ('security of the cloud').
This isolates the options that are managed by AWS rather than the customer.
2
Determine the customer's responsibility for protecting data ('security in the cloud').
Recognize that managing encryption settings, keys, and application-level configurations for PCI data is the customer's responsibility.
This confirms the correct compliance task under customer ownership.

Key Concept

AWS Shared Responsibility Model for Compliance
Rate this question

Topics

Compliance and Governance

More questions from this topic