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AWS won't protect your data — and that's on purpose
💡 AWS secures the cloud infrastructure itself, but protecting your data, access, and configurations is always your job.
New cloud users often assume that once their app lives on AWS, Amazon takes care of security top to bottom. That assumption has caused some of the biggest data leaks in history. AWS operates on a Shared Responsibility Model, a clear dividing line describing who secures what.
AWS is responsible for security of the cloud — the physical data centers, the servers, the networking hardware, and the core software that runs services. You never patch a server rack or guard a building. But you are responsible for security in the cloud — your data, your access permissions, your firewall rules, and how you configure each service.
The classic disaster is a misconfigured S3 bucket left open to the public internet. AWS kept its infrastructure perfectly secure, but the customer chose the settings that exposed millions of records. That's not an AWS failure — it falls squarely on the customer's side of the line.
The split shifts depending on the service. With managed services like databases, AWS handles more (patching, backups); with raw compute like EC2, you own the operating system and everything on it. Knowing which side of the line you're standing on is the first real lesson in cloud security.