Understanding your responsibilities when using projects
Learn about the management responsibilities and terms and conditions that you have when you use projects. For a high-level view of the service types in IBM Cloud® and the breakdown of responsibilities between the customer and IBM for each type, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud offerings.
Review the following sections for the specific responsibilities for you and for IBM when you use projects. For the overall terms of use, see IBM Cloud® Terms and Notices.
Incident and operations management
Incident and operations management includes tasks such as monitoring, event management, high availability, problem determination, recovery, and full state backup and recovery.
| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Monitor the status of a project | IBM provides the ability for customers to monitor their project's lifecycle. | Use the needs attention widget to monitor events that specifically impact the lifecycle of your project. You can also use the IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service to audit events for a project. |
Change management
Change management includes tasks such as deployment, configuration, upgrades, patching, configuration changes, and deletion.
| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Updates, fixes, and new features | IBM provides regular updates and bug fixes, as well as new features following a continuous delivery model in a manner transparent to the customer. | N/A |
| Creating and deploying configurations | IBM provides the ability for customers to create and deploy configurations by using projects. | Use projects to configure and deploy a deployable architecture. |
| Deleting a project | IBM provides the ability for customers to delete a project. | Customers can delete a project whenever they need to. |
| Pulling deployable architecture changes into a project | IBM provides the ability for customers to update the version of a deployable architecture in a project, should a new version become available. | Customers are notified when a new deployable architecture version is available so they can update their project accordingly.
Customers can save their existing project data with API, CLI, or by exporting the project.json from the UI, which can be used as backup or as rollover plan if there is an issue. Customers can then test the deployable architecture changes by deploying in a development or test environment before going to production. This can all be done within the same project. |
Identity and access management
Identity and access management includes tasks such as authentication, authorization, access control policies, and approving, granting, and revoking access.
| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Accessing projects | IBM provides the ability to control user access to projects. | Use Identity and Access Management (IAM) to assign users access to projects. |
| Authorize a project to deploy a configuration | IBM provides the ability to authorize a project to deploy a configuration. | Choose an authentication method to authorize a project to deploy in an account. Use an API key or an existing secret to authorize a project to deploy an architecture in an account. |
Security and regulation compliance
Security and regulation compliance includes tasks such as security controls implementation and compliance certification.
| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Meet security and compliance objectives | Provide a secure IBM Cloud Projects service that complies with key standards. For more information about data security, see How do I know that my data is safe?. | Secure your workloads and data. Integrate tools into your toolchains that satisfy your security and compliance requirements. To learn more about securing your cloud apps, see Security to safeguard and monitor your cloud apps. To learn more about securing your data while you are using the IBM Cloud Projects service, see Securing your data. To learn more about regulatory compliance with the IBM Cloud Projects service, see Understanding tool integrations with IBM for Financial Services. |
Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery includes tasks such as providing dependencies on disaster recovery sites, provision disaster recovery environments, data and configuration backup, replicating data and configuration to the disaster recovery environment, and failover on disaster events.
| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Meet disaster recovery objectives | IBM follows best practices for disaster recovery. All IBM applications automatically recover and restart after any disaster event. For more information about disaster recovery see the IBM Disaster Recovery Plan. | Customer can help meet DR objectives by deploying their project in a development or test environment before deploying to production.
There are no other actions the customer needs to take to prepare for an event of a catastrophic failure in a region. |
| Meet high availability objectives | IBM is available globally and load balanced from a single URL. It is highly available and continues to run even if your resources are unavailable. For more information about high availability, please see the IBM service level objectives and the sample application architecture. | N/A |
| Back up project data | IBM performs regular electronic backups of project data with Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of hours as documented in the IBM Disaster Recovery Plan. | Customers are not responsible for backups for data stored by projects. However, customers can use project data via API, CLI, or by downloading the project.json from the UI and as a backup. |
| Restore project data | IBM automatically restores project data from backups in case of a data loss event. | Customers can retrieve project data via API, CLI, or by downloading the project.json from the UI |