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BackWhat is Shared responsibility model?
The shared responsibility model defines how security, compliance, and operational duties are divided between a service provider and the customer.
In cloud environments, the provider secures the underlying service, while the organization secures what it configures, uploads, connects, and runs. The boundary changes by cloud service model, contract terms, data sensitivity, and how much control the customer has over the environment.
How does it work?
Organizations use the shared responsibility model to map each control to an owner. A cloud provider may handle physical facilities, core infrastructure, and platform availability, while the customer handles identities, access rules, endpoint security, data protection, workload configuration, and monitoring.
The model should be documented in policies, vendor reviews, risk registers, and audit evidence. Clear ownership reduces assumptions during migrations, incidents, compliance checks, and security reviews.
| Responsibility area | What it means |
| Provider infrastructure | The provider manages facilities, hardware, networking foundations, and core service availability. |
| Customer configuration | The customer manages users, permissions, data, applications, devices, and security settings. |
| Shared controls | Both parties may contribute to patching, logging, incident response, resilience, and compliance evidence. |
Shared responsibility model vs shared fate
The shared responsibility model separates accountability by defining what the provider owns and what the customer owns. Shared fate expands that idea by emphasizing joint security outcomes, provider guardrails, secure defaults, and practical guidance.
Shared fate does not remove customer obligations. It adds stronger collaboration, while customers still remain responsible for secure configuration, endpoint posture, access governance, and data handling.
How Hexnode supports shared responsibility model
Hexnode supports the customer side of the model by helping organizations control the endpoints that access cloud services, SaaS apps, business data, and corporate networks. With Hexnode UEM, teams can maintain endpoint visibility, apply policy enforcement, run compliance checks, manage patch workflows, configure application controls, and perform remote actions such as lock, wipe, or restriction changes.
This helps organizations prove that managed devices meet baseline requirements before they connect to sensitive resources. It also reduces the gap between cloud security policies and device-level execution.
When should organizations use it?
Organizations should use it whenever they adopt SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, managed services, or third-party platforms. It is especially important before cloud migration, vendor onboarding, security audits, regulatory reviews, and incident response planning.
The model is also useful when teams need to clarify who owns encryption, backups, identity management, vulnerability remediation, endpoint security audits, and breach response steps. Without that clarity, critical controls can be duplicated, ignored, or assumed to belong to someone else.
FAQs
No. It is most common in cloud security, but the same idea applies to SaaS, managed IT, outsourcing, and any environment where control is split between two parties.
The customer usually remains responsible for classifying, securing, backing up, and governing its data, even when the provider hosts or processes it.
The biggest risk is an ownership gap, where each side assumes the other is handling a control such as access review, device compliance, logging, or backup validation.
