In cloud environments, security is not the provider's problem alone. Responsibility is explicitly divided — and the gap between the two parties is where most breaches happen.
As organizations move workloads to cloud services, a fundamental question arises: who is responsible for securing what? The Shared Responsibility Model provides the answer — it explicitly divides security obligations between the cloud provider and the customer based on the service model in use. Neither party can assume the other has it covered.
Key pattern: As you move from IaaS → PaaS → SaaS, the provider takes on more responsibility — and the customer's surface area shrinks. But customers never escape full responsibility for their data classification, identity management, and endpoint security regardless of service model.
The gap is where breaches happen. Most cloud security incidents are not provider failures — they are customer misconfigurations, identity failures, or assumptions that the provider was covering something the customer actually owns. Before deploying any cloud workload, explicitly document where the handoff occurs. Gaps at that boundary are where attackers find their way in.