Most IT teams assume this

If you spend enough time speaking with IT teams, founders, or solution architects, you’ll eventually hear a line that sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface - the kind of sentence that makes everyone nod because it feels safe and logical.

The line usually goes something like this: “We’re using the client’s cloud account, so the infra risk stays with them.”

It sounds tidy. It feels like a shield. And it is completely wrong in practice.

Because while engineers believe they’re simply working inside someone else’s environment, the client sees the situation very differently.

From the client’s perspective, they gave you access, and everything that happens inside that account - every configuration, every permission, every architecture decision - was touched by your hands.

They see you architecting the system. They see you setting up IAM roles, VPCs, security groups, and gateways.

They see you creating buckets, configuring ACLs, deploying instances, and defining rules. In their view, you’re not borrowing their cloud account - you’re operating it.

So when something goes wrong, who do you think they call first? Not AWS. Not Azure support. Not their internal IT department.

They call you because you were the last one who touched it, and that’s how responsibility gets assigned when things break.

This is where the disconnect sits quietly inside most IT relationships: cloud may be a shared responsibility model on paper, but it becomes a blame-transfer model the moment something goes wrong.

Why Cloud Misunderstandings Become Legal Problems

Assumptions are silent until they explode. A single misconfiguration - something tiny, something that takes ten seconds to fix - can create consequences that cost months of effort:

• One public S3 bucket

• One overly permissive IAM role

• One access key that never got rotated

• One forgotten test environment left unprotected

That’s all it takes for an entire system to be exposed. And when it happens, everyone starts pointing fingers because everyone is operating from their own assumptions:

“Wasn’t firewall management your job?”

“I thought your team handled key rotation.”

“We assumed you were tracking logs.”

“Our understanding was that you patched everything.”

No one is lying. They’re all speaking from the version of reality they believed was true.

This is the predictable outcome when responsibilities remain implied instead of documented. And the moment there is ambiguity, a technical problem becomes a legal one.

The Fix: Write It Down Before Anything Breaks

Every IT engagement - whether it’s DevOps, development, cloud architecture, or managed service - should begin with one thing:

A responsibility matrix. Not a friendly chat. Not meeting notes. Not good intentions.

An actual, written, signed document detailing who does what.

Break responsibilities down clearly and without shortcuts:

1) Who patches the system?

If you don’t document this, patches simply never happen.

2) Who manages firewall rules and security configurations?

Half of preventable breaches come from unclear firewall responsibility.

3) Who rotates access keys, tokens, and credentials?

Most companies assume the other side will handle this — and that assumption is dangerous.

4) Who is responsible for encryption settings, both at rest and in transit?

Cloud providers may enable encryption, but someone actually has to configure it.

5) Who monitors audit logs and responds to alerts?

If this job belongs to “everyone,” it ends up belonging to no one.

When this is clearly written down, something powerful shifts inside the relationship: Clarity replaces assumption. Accountability replaces guesswork. And both sides understand exactly where their ownership begins and ends.

Most IT Problems Aren’t Technical

Systems don’t usually fail because of bad code. They fail because no one defined who was responsible for the part that broke.

And when something finally does break, the client doesn’t care about the shared responsibility model poster on AWS’s website.

They care about the real-world chain of responsibility, and that chain ends at the last person who touched the system.

This is why documenting responsibility isn’t bureaucracy. It’s protection.

It protects your team. It protects the client relationship.

And it prevents the kind of finger-pointing that ruins trust long after the issue is fixed.

Before you build anything, before the first VM spins up, before the first environment is created, define the roles clearly and in writing.

Because in IT, assumptions aren’t harmless.

They’re liabilities waiting to mature.

Conclusion

The longer I work with IT companies, the clearer it becomes that the biggest failures don’t happen inside the systems.

They happen in the spaces between people - the undefined expectations, the unspoken assumptions, the responsibility gaps that only show themselves after damage has already been done.

When roles are defined clearly, the work becomes cleaner, the relationship becomes healthier, and the risk becomes manageable. But when everything is left to interpretation, even the most well-built system can collapse under the weight of confusion.

If there is one habit every IT company should adopt, it is this: document responsibility early, clearly, and completely because clarity isn’t just good practice; it is the foundation of trust.