The cloud service provider is responsible for protecting the physical infrastructure of data centers, including buildings, servers, and networking equipment. While managing patches, configuring firewall rules, and handling user access are security-related tasks that might be shared or fall on the customer based on the service model (e.g., EC2 requires customer management for patches, but RDS is managed by the provider), the physical security of data centers is a task solely undertaken by the cloud service provider and is not transferred to the customer.