Definition — PaaS

Government organisations can develop their own applications using the provider’s:

• infrastructure
• operating systems
• middleware
• development tools
• application services — for example, web servers or database platforms.

PaaS allows government organisations to deploy and run their own applications, which need to be developed using programming languages the service provider supports.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) — National Institute of Standards and Technology

Marketplace contracts available for PaaS

Catalogue for digital experience services — Marketplace

Shared responsibility for security in PaaS

In PaaS, government organisations and service providers share responsibility for security. Each is responsible for managing different areas of PaaS.

Government organisations

Government organisations are responsible for the security controls for the:

• application
• data
• development and testing.

Service providers

Service providers are responsible for the implementation, management and maintenance of the security controls for the:

• data centre
• hardware
• virtualisation hypervisor
• operating system
• middleware
• development tools and libraries.

Ownership of the information’s risk

Government organisations always own the risk of their information in a public cloud service, even though the management of certain security responsibilities are shared.

How to manage security ownership

Find out how government organisations handle their security ownership — making sure that risks are within their risk tolerance.

Security ownership in all service models

More information

New Zealand’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) lists and explains how each service model operates and the differing levels of responsibility for managing security.

Cloud computing: shared responsibility security models — NCSC