CCSK Cloud Security Alliance Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSKv5.0) Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Effective cloud governance focuses on managing and overseeing cloud resources to ensure that security, compliance, and business objectives are met. Key aspects include:

Decision making: Establishing clear processes for how decisions are made regarding cloud resource usage, security measures, and compliance strategies.

Prioritization: Ensuring that critical security and compliance risks are prioritized and addressed first.

Monitoring: Continuously monitoring cloud environments for security threats, performance issues, and compliance violations.

Transparency: Ensuring that governance activities are visible to stakeholders, enabling accountability and making it easier to demonstrate compliance with laws, regulations, and internal policies.

These aspects help organizations maintain control over their cloud environments while ensuring they meet security and regulatory requirements.

The principle of Segregation of Duties (SoD) focuses on implementing multiple security layers by dividing responsibilities among different individuals or systems to ensure that no single entity has enough control to misuse or compromise access. This principle helps to prevent fraud, error, and misuse by ensuring that critical tasks are divided and that sensitive actions require multiple people or processes to perform, adding an extra layer of security.

Continuous Monitoring refers to the ongoing observation of activities to detect unusual behavior, but it is not directly about diluting access power. Federation involves linking multiple identity management systems together to allow access across different domains but does not specifically address limiting access power through multiple security layers. Principle of Least Privilege ensures that users have only the minimum necessary access to perform their tasks, but it does not directly involve dividing duties or responsibilities.

The most direct benefit of automated deployment pipelines in addressing continuous security and reliability is that they enable consistent and repeatable deployment processes. This ensures that the same steps are followed every time code is deployed, reducing human error and inconsistencies that could introduce vulnerabilities or reliability issues. Automated pipelines can also include security checks, such as static codeanalysis, vulnerability scanning, and automated testing, all of which help ensure that security and reliability are maintained continuously.

Enhancing collaboration through shared tools is a benefit of automated pipelines but doesn't directly address security and reliability. Providing detailed reports on team performance is useful for team management but doesn't directly contribute to security or reliability. Ensure code quality through regular reviews can improve security indirectly but is not the most direct benefit when it comes to continuous security and reliability in the deployment process.

Taking snapshots of virtual machines (VMs) is one of the most effective techniques for preserving digital evidence in a cloud environment. Snapshots capture the entire state of a VM, including its memory, configuration, and disk contents at a particular point in time. This allows investigators to preserve evidence as it was at the moment of the incident, enabling detailed analysis without altering the original state of the system.

While isolating the compromised system is important to prevent further damage, snapshots are more directly useful for preserving evidence. Backing up data and analyzing management plane logs are also valuable for incident response, but they don't capture the complete state of a compromised system as effectively as snapshots do.

SASE reduces latency and enhances performance by filtering traffic closer to the user, avoiding the need to backhaul traffic to a central data center. Reference: [Security Guidance v5, Domain 7 - Network Security]

A Service Registry lists approved services, making it easy for teams to find and integrate compliant services. Reference: [CCSK Knowledge Guide, Domain 3 - Risk and Compliance Tools]

In multi-tenant technologies, the fundamental security requirement issegmented and segregated customer environments. Multi-tenancy means that multiple customers (tenants) share the same physical or virtual infrastructure while maintaining logical separation to prevent data leakage and unauthorized access between tenants.

To ensure security and compliance in multi-tenant environments, providers implement:

Network segmentation (VLANs, Virtual Private Clouds)

Isolation mechanisms (such as virtual firewalls and access control lists)

Data isolation through encryption and access controls

Hypervisor-based isolation in virtualized environments

The goal is to create stronglogical isolationbetween tenants to mitigate risks likedata leakage, guest-hopping attacks, and unauthorized access.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

B. Limited resource allocation:While resource limits may help performance management, they do not inherently ensure security in multi-tenant settings.

C. Resource pooling:Though fundamental to cloud computing, it does not address the isolation needed for secure multi-tenancy.

D. Abstraction and automation:These are key elements in cloud computing but do not directly address multi-tenant security.

Privilege escalationis a majorcloud security riskbecause attackers can:

Gain administrative access to cloud environments.

Modify security configurations, disable logs, and exfiltrate sensitive data.

Expand the attack blast radius, compromising multiple cloud resources.

To mitigateidentity escalation threats, security teams must:

Implement strong IAM policies with least privilege access.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Just-in-Time (JIT) access.

Monitor IAM logs for unusual privilege escalations and lateral movements.

This is detailed in:

CCSK v5 - Security Guidance v4.0, Domain 12 (Identity, Entitlement, and Access Management)

Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) - IAM Controls and Privilege Escalation Prevention​.

A key benefit ofSoftware-Defined Networking (SDN)is that it allows networks to bedynamically configured and managed through software. SDN separates the control plane from the data plane, enabling centralized management and programmable network configurations, which improves flexibility and scalability in cloud environments.

From theCCSK v5.0 Study Guide, Domain 9 (Network Security), Section 9.3:

“Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables dynamic configuration and management of networks through software, decoupling the control plane from the data plane. This allows organizations to programmatically adjust network policies and traffic flows, improving agility and scalability in cloud environments.”

Option C (SDN allows networks to be dynamically configured and managed through software) is the correct answer.

Option A (Hardware-based solution) is incorrect because SDN is software-based.

Option B (Eliminates physical devices) is incorrect because SDN still relies on physical infrastructure.

Option D (Focused on firewalls) is incorrect because SDN’s primary benefit is flexibility, not firewalls.

The Shared Security Responsibility Model clarifies which security responsibilities are managed by the CSP and which by the CSC, based on the service model. Reference: [CCSK Study Guide, Domain 1 - Cloud Security Models][16†source].

Immutable infrastructure maintains static configurations after deployment, ensuring consistency and preventing unauthorized changes. Reference: [Security Guidance v5, Domain 8 - Cloud Workload Security]

In the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) shared responsibility model, the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is typically responsible for securing the physical infrastructure, which includes the physical security of data centers, servers, networking hardware, and the physical security controls that protect them from unauthorized access or damage.

Encrypting data at rest is typically the responsibility of the consumer, though the CSP may offer tools to help with this. Managing application code is the responsibility of the consumer, as they control and deploy the applications on the infrastructure provided by the CSP. Configuring firewall rules is also the responsibility of the consumer, as they manage the configuration of the virtual network, including security rules like firewalls.

The Detection & Analysis phase of incident response involves the validation of alerts to reduce false positives and estimating the scope of the incident. During this phase, security teams assess whether the alerts indicate an actual incident, investigate the nature and severity of the threat, and determine the affected systems, data, and potential impact. This phase is critical for accurately identifying the scope of the issue and ensuring appropriate actions are taken in subsequent phases, such as containment and eradication.