Security Demarcation Iaas Paas Gke Cloud Run

What the Google Cloud shared responsibility model is

The Google Cloud shared responsibility model defines the distinct division of security, operational, and compliance obligations between Google Cloud (the cloud service provider) and the customer. As organizations transition from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS) and fully managed container environments, Google assumes greater operational responsibility for lower-level infrastructure, operating systems, and virtualization layers.

How it meets the compliance mapping requirements

• Compute Engine (IaaS): Google secures the physical hardware, data centers, and KVM hypervisor. The customer retains full ownership and responsibility for selecting, configuring, hardening, and regularly patching the guest operating system, middleware, runtime stacks, and firewall rules.
• GKE Standard: Google provisions and maintains the control plane (master nodes, Kubernetes API, etcd). The customer maintains administrative control over the worker node pools, including configuring autoscaling parameters, selecting node OS images, and managing node upgrade cycles or maintenance windows.
• GKE Autopilot & Cloud Run (PaaS / Managed Containers): Google manages and patches the underlying node infrastructure, operating system kernels, container runtime engines, and scaling mechanisms automatically.
• Universal Customer Responsibilities: Across all deployment architectures (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS), the customer always retains sole responsibility for securing their application logic, scanning and remediating vulnerabilities in container images, defining Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, and enforcing data classification and data protection.

Key advantages and capabilities

• Reduced operational overhead: Migrating from IaaS to GKE Autopilot or Cloud Run shifts operating system maintenance, security hardening, and infrastructure patching to Google SRE teams.
• Consistent governance: Centralized customer responsibilities—such as IAM, data governance, and application security—remain uniform regardless of the underlying execution platform.
• Hardened baseline: Managed container environments provide pre-configured, attested platform baselines that align with industry compliance benchmarks.

Why this is optimal

This mapping correctly reflects the exact boundaries of operational control across compute architectures. It ensures that internal compliance teams accurately assign operational patch management tasks without creating security blind spots.