In Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, responsibilities vary by service type. For IaaS (for example, Azure Virtual Machines), Microsoft states that it is responsible for protecting and maintaining the cloud infrastructure that runs customer workloads, while customers secure what they deploy in that infrastructure. Microsoft’s guidance explains that Microsoft “operates and secures the datacenters, physical hosts, networking, and the virtualization fabric,” and handles the underlying platform maintenance, including “hardware and firmware” that support those hosts. Conversely, customers are responsible for what runs inside their VM: “the guest operating system (including updates and security configuration), applications, identity, and data.”
Applied to the options in this question:
Updating the operating system and updating installed applications are customer tasks because they are inside the guest VM.
Configuring permissions for shared folders is also a customer responsibility because it’s an OS/application configuration within the guest.
Updating the firmware of the disk controller belongs to Microsoft, because firmware and hardware on the physical hosts (including storage controllers) are part of the infrastructure of the cloud that Microsoft manages and secures.
This aligns with SCI study materials that summarize: Microsoft secures “the security of the cloud” (physical datacenter, hosts, network, and hypervisor/firmware), while customers secure “security in the cloud” (guest OS, apps, and data).
