---
name: Cloudant-responsibilities
title: Understanding your responsibilities when you use IBM Cloudant
description: Learn about the management responsibilities, and terms and conditions, that you own when you use IBM® Cloudant® for IBM Cloud®. 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 using IBM Cloud offerings.
last-updated: 2023-04-03
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

# Understanding your responsibilities when you use IBM Cloudant
{: #cloudant-responsibilities}

Learn about the management responsibilities, and terms and conditions, that you own when you use IBM® Cloudant® for IBM Cloud®. 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 using IBM Cloud offerings](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/overview?topic=overview-shared-responsibilities&format=markdown). 
{: shortdesc}

Review the following sections to understand the specific responsibilities between you and IBM when you use IBM Cloudant. For the overall terms of use, see [IBM Cloud Terms and Notices](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/overview/terms-of-use?topic=overview-terms&format=markdown). 

## Incident and operations management
{: #incident-and-ops}

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 |
|----------|-----------------------|--------|
|HA/DR (multi-zone region) | IBM Cloudant stores all documents in triplicate on separate servers that are spread across three separate availability zones by default.  | |
|HA/DR (single-zone region)| IBM Cloudant stores all documents in triplicate on three separate physical servers within the availability zone by default.  | |
|Back up and restore|   | Customer is responsible for backup and restore of data to roll back to a previous state in the database. See [IBM Cloudant backup and recovery](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant?topic=Cloudant-ibm-cloudant-backup-and-recovery&format=markdown) documentation for recommended tooling. |
{: summary="The first column describes the task that the customer or IBM might be responsible for. The second column describes IBM responsibilities for that task. The third column describes your responsibilities as the customer for that task."}
{: caption="Responsibilities for incident and operations" caption-side="top"}

## Change management
{: #change-management-responsibilities}

Change management includes tasks such as deployment, configuration, upgrades, patching, configuration changes, and deletion. 

| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|----------|-----------------------|--------|
|Scaling| IBM scales infrastructure to meet capacity selected by the customer.  | Customer chooses the provisioned throughput capacity for their IBM Cloudant instances. |
|Upgrades| IBM handles all upgrades and patches of the IBM Cloudant service for the customer.  | |
{: summary="The first column describes the task that the customer or IBM might be responsible for. The second column describes IBM responsibilities for that task. The third column describes your responsibilities as the customer for that task."}
{: caption="Responsibilities for change management" caption-side="top"}


## Security and regulation compliance
{: #security-compliance-responsibilities}

Security and regulation compliance includes tasks such as security controls implementation and compliance certification. 

| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|----------|-----------------------|--------|
|At-rest encryption| By default, IBM encrypts all disks by using IBM Cloudant-managed encryption keys.   | If the customer wants bring-your-own-key (BYOK) encryption, then the customer is required to use Key Protect to store the customer-managed encryption key. The customer must select an appropriate key management service instance, and select a disk encryption key option during provisioning of an IBM Cloudant Dedicated Hardware plan instance. |
| Make data unreadable to IBM Cloudant Operators | None, IBM does not render data unreadable to IBM Cloudant Operators. | If you intend to store sensitive information in an IBM Cloudant database, you must use client-side encryption to render data unreadable to IBM Cloudant operators. For example, for PCI DSS compliance, you must encrypt the Primary Account Number (PAN) before sending a document that contains it to the database.|
{: summary="The first column describes the task that the customer or IBM might be responsible for. The second column describes IBM responsibilities for that task. The third column describes your responsibilities as the customer for that task."}
{: caption="Responsibilities for security and regulation compliance" caption-side="top"}


## Disaster recovery
{: #disaster-recovery-responsibilities}

Disaster recovery includes the following tasks:

- Provide dependencies on disaster recovery sites.
- Provision disaster recovery environments.
- Back up data and configuration.
- Replicate data and configuration to the disaster recovery environment.
- Fail over disaster events.

| Task | IBM Responsibilities | Your Responsibilities |
|----------|-----------------------|--------|
|HA/DR (cross-region)|  | Customer is responsible for creating more IBM Cloudant instances in separate regions and configuring replications to achieve the cross-region HA/DR architecture they want. See [Configuring IBM Cloudant for cross-region disaster recovery](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant?topic=Cloudant-configuring-ibm-cloudant-for-cross-region-disaster-recovery&format=markdown) for more details.  |
{: summary="The first column describes the task that the customer or IBM might be responsible for. The second column describes IBM responsibilities for that task. The third column describes your responsibilities as the customer for that task."}
{: caption="Responsibilities for disaster recovery" caption-side="top"}