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Question

Difficulty: HardCloud Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)

A biotechnology firm is deploying a proprietary genomic data processing application on virtual machines hosted within an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud environment. Which of the following maintenance and security tasks remain the direct responsibility of the firm's internal IT administration team? (Select TWO.)

  1. Applying security patches to the guest operating systems and installed application stacksAnswer
  2. Configuring host-based firewall rules and OS-level network security controlsAnswer
  3. C
    Updating and patching the underlying bare-metal Type 1 hypervisor software
  4. D
    Replacing defective physical hard drives in the cloud provider's storage arrays

Answer

The customer's internal IT administration team is responsible for applying security patches to guest operating systems and application stacks, as well as configuring host-based firewall rules and OS-level network access security controls.
Under the cloud shared responsibility model for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the cloud provider manages the physical infrastructure, facility security, physical host servers, storage arrays, and hypervisor layer. The customer retains operational responsibility for everything built on top of the virtual hardware, which includes installing and patching guest operating systems, managing application middleware, configuring guest network settings, and enforcing host-based firewall rules.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the cloud service model responsibility boundaries for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Identify that in IaaS, the provider manages physical facilities, hardware, physical networking, and hypervisors, while the customer manages guest OS, middleware, runtime environments, data, and applications.
Understanding the shared responsibility model allows administrators to properly delineate tasks between cloud vendors and tenant IT staff.
2
Evaluate the customer-managed responsibilities among the given options.
Guest operating system patching and host-based firewall configuration are OS-level and application-level tasks that belong to the customer.
Because the tenant has administrative rights over the virtual instances, maintaining OS updates and firewall rules is their direct responsibility.
3
Filter out cloud provider responsibilities.
Hypervisor maintenance and physical hard drive replacement belong to physical infrastructure and virtualization layer control.
IaaS abstracts physical hardware and hypervisor management away from the tenant, assigning those hardware-level tasks exclusively to the vendor.

Key Concept

Shared Responsibility Model in IaaS (Customer OS/App Control vs. Provider Infrastructure Control)
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Topics

Cloud Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)

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