Understanding where to focus your effort
Keeping your customers' data safe is the result of keeping multiple layers of the infrastructure and services secured. Because we are in a cloud environment, we don't have access to every layer of our infrastructure. For instance, we don't have physical access to the data centers where our EC2 instances are running. Therefore, keeping each layer secured is a responsibility shared between you and AWS.
The shared responsibility model
In this world of shared responsibility, AWS provides the security of the cloud and as an AWS user, you are responsible for providing the security in the cloud. In other words, AWS will take care of securing the datacenters, the physical infrastructure, the physical network, the virtualization layer, and the host's operating systems. In turn, as an AWS user, you are responsible for managing and operating the guest operating systems, applying security patches, IAM permissions, security groups, and access policies.
As we know...
