1.3.2. Shared Responsibility: Customer's Role (ML Focus)

First Principle: The customer is responsible for "security in the cloud," securing their ML data, model configurations, access controls, and the applications that consume ML predictions within AWS services.

In the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, the customer's responsibility is for "security in the cloud." For Machine Learning Specialists, this means securing everything they configure and manage within their AWS ML environment.

Key Customer Responsibilities ("Security in the Cloud") for ML:

• Data Security:
  • Encryption: Enabling encryption for data at rest (S3 bucket encryption, EBS encryption) and in transit (configuring SSL/TLS).
  • Data Access: Configuring S3 bucket policies and AWS Lake Formation permissions.
  • Data Masking/Anonymization: Implementing practices to desensitize private data.
• Access Management: Defining and enforcing IAM policies for SageMaker notebooks, training jobs, model endpoints, and underlying data stores.
• Network Configuration:
  • Configuring SageMaker VPC mode for private network connectivity to your VPC.
  • Defining Security Groups and Network ACLs for ML instances.
  • Creating VPC Endpoints for private access to AWS services.
• Model Security:
  • Ensuring model artifacts are stored securely (S3).
  • Implementing model access controls.
• Operational Logging and Monitoring:
  • Enabling CloudTrail for API activity related to ML services.
  • Configuring CloudWatch alarms for model performance metrics.
  • Utilizing SageMaker Model Monitor for data/model quality drift.

Scenario: When deploying a real-time inference endpoint for a financial fraud detection model, you, as an ML Specialist, are responsible for ensuring the endpoint is hosted within a private VPC, configuring IAM roles for access, and enabling encryption for data passing through the endpoint.

Reflection Question: How does failing to configure S3 bucket policies properly or mismanaging SageMaker endpoint access controls directly demonstrate a failure in your responsibility for "security in the cloud" within the Shared Responsibility Model for ML?