The shared responsibility model in cloud security is often misused by vendors to transfer risk to customers through weak defaults. The key differentiator is what a deployment looks like on day one before any customer configuration. SingleStore Helios ships with AES-256 encryption, TLS 1.2+ enforced, no public internet exposure by default, per-customer compute isolation, and secure credential management out of the box. Customer responsibilities are limited to organization-specific configurations like IP allowlists, identity provider integration, RBAC design, and customer-managed encryption keys. A vendor due diligence questionnaire framework is provided to help evaluate whether any cloud database vendor's shared responsibility model genuinely protects customers or merely shifts blame.
