Understanding your responsibilities when using Qiskit Runtime

Review the following sections for the specific responsibilities for you and for IBM® when you use Qiskit Runtime. For the overall terms of use, see Terms and Notices for IBM Cloud®.

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
Infrastructure health management	Continuously deliver new features, updates, and bug fixes as needed in a transparent manner. Provide notifications for planned maintenance, security bulletins, or unplanned outages.	Set preferences to receive emails about service notifications. Monitor the IBM Cloud status page for general announcements.
Infrastructure health monitoring and notification	Remediate all infrastructure environment issues. Notify customers of applicable incidents.	Ascertain the impact of each reported incident. Engage IBM Support as required.
Maintain IBM Cloud high availability SLA	Operate Qiskit Runtime in accordance with the IBM Cloud Public Service Level Agreements (SLAs).	Follow high availability best practices.

Change management

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

Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
Major version upgrades	Provide availability and tools for major version updates.	Migrate to a supported version before end-of-support for an old version.
API version changes	Versioning the REST APIs.	Integrate with the wanted version of REST APIs.
Updates, fixes, and new features	Provide regular updates, bug fixes, and new features, transparently following a continuous delivery model. Post notifications for changes that impact customers.	Set preferences to receive email notifications and monitor the IBM Cloud status page for general announcements. Read system-generated notifications and platform announcements, and take appropriate action.

Identity and access management

Identity and access management includes tasks such as authentication, authorization, managing access control policies, and approving, granting, and revoking access.

Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
Identity and access control	Provide the ability to manage and restrict access to resources through IBM Cloud.	Grant, revoke, and manage access to resources through Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM).
Service authentication	Ensure that only authenticated users have access to your Qiskit Runtime services and resources.	Safeguard your API key from unauthorized access. Rotate and update your API keys according to your security policy requirements.
Observability	Allow integration of IBM Cloud Activity Tracker Event Routing to audit user actions.	Set up IBM Cloud Activity Tracker Event Routing or other functions to track user activity.

Security and regulation compliance

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

Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
General	Maintain controls commensurate to various industry compliance standards. Monitor, isolate, and recover service functionality. Monitor and report the health of service interfaces.	Ensure that personal and regulated data is not provided.
Vulnerabilities	Monitor to detect vulnerability and security compliance issues.	Keep informed about possible vulnerabilities and security issues through security bulletins that provide potential remediation actions. Check the IBM Cloud status website to find announcements and security bulletins about key events that affect the IBM Cloud platform, infrastructure, and major services.
Encryption	Encrypt data when it is transmitted on any public networks and within the Cloud Service's private data center network. Encryption methods such as HTTPS and TLS are used to protect data in motion.	Ensure, as required, that your connection is encrypted end-to-end.
Security	Ensure the security of data on disk and data in motion within its infrastructure. Provide a secure service that complies with key standards.	Restrict user access to the appropriate resources and resource groups.

Disaster recovery

Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
General	Restore or rebuild the provisioning environments and resources in the affected regions.	Monitor instance and resource states. Provision new Qiskit Runtime service instances in an alternate region, if available.
Recovery of services	Automatically recover and restore the Qiskit Runtime service capabilities to normal operations.	Resubmit any impacted jobs following recovery.
Backup of user configuration data	IBM is not responsible for backup of user configuration data.	Backup of any configuration data, as needed.
Backup and recovery of workloads	IBM is not responsible for backup or recovery of user workload data.	Backup and recovery of your workloads, as needed.