Managing-Cloud-Security WGU Managing Cloud Security (JY02) Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

WithSaaS, applications are delivered entirely by the provider, and customers have little to no control over the underlying platform or data portability. This creates a higher risk ofvendor lock-in, as migrating away from one SaaS provider to another may require reworking applications or losing features.

In contrast,PaaSgives customers more flexibility by allowing them to build, deploy, and manage their own applications while relying on standardized frameworks and platforms. Because applications are customer-managed, switching providers or migrating workloads can be easier compared to SaaS.

Vendor lock-out, personnel threats, and natural disasters are risks in any service model. The key differentiator here is portability and flexibility. Choosing PaaS reduces dependence on a single provider’s application features, thereby lowering vendor lock-in risk while still offloading infrastructure management.

The described scenario is aninjection attack. Injection occurs when unvalidated input—such as SQL commands, script code, or OS instructions—is sent to an application through API forms or parameters. If the application fails to sanitize input, the attacker’s code may be executed with full system privileges.

On-path attacks intercept communication, credential attacks target authentication, and denial-of-service floods services. None involve code execution via unvalidated input.

Injection is a top risk in OWASP API Security Top 10. Developers must implement input validation, parameterized queries, and least privilege principles to mitigate this risk. API gateways and WAFs provide additional layers of protection but cannot replace secure coding practices.

The described control isauthorization, which occurs after authentication. Authorization determines what resources a user can access based on their role, attributes, or policies stored in an access control database.

Authentication confirms identity, but authorization validates permissions. WAFs protect applications from malicious traffic, and antispyware tools detect malware. Neither applies to access decisions.

By checking users against a database of permissions, the organization enforces the principle of least privilege, ensuring employees only access the resources necessary for their role. This strengthens data protection, reduces insider threats, and aligns with compliance requirements for access governance.

The most critical concern in long-term cloud storage iskey management. If encryption keys are lost, corrupted, or improperly rotated, the organization will lose the ability to decrypt its own data, rendering backups unusable. This issue is particularly serious because cloud storage almost always relies on encryption to secure sensitive or regulated information.

While regulatory compliance, quantum threats, and change tracking are important, none directly prevent permanent data loss. The reliability of key management ensures that access to long-term archival data is preserved across changes in personnel, technology, and vendors.

Best practices include using centralized key management systems (such as Hardware Security Modules or cloud Key Management Services), applying role-based controls, and performing periodic key rotation and escrow. Addressing key management in the backup plan ensures that data will remain accessible for years or decades, regardless of technological shifts.

TheDestroyphase of the cloud data life cycle is where information is permanently removed from systems. A common technique in cloud environments for this phase iscrypto-shredding(or cryptographic erasure). Rather than physically destroying the media, crypto-shredding involves deleting or revoking encryption keys used to protect the data. Once those keys are destroyed, the encrypted data becomes mathematically unrecoverable, even if the underlying storage media remains intact.

This method is particularly useful in cloud environments where storage is virtualized and hardware cannot easily be physically destroyed. Crypto-shredding provides compliance-friendly assurance that sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, or healthcare records cannot be accessed after retention periods expire or contractual obligations end.

By incorporating crypto-shredding into theDestroyphase, organizations align with standards forsecure data sanitization. This ensures legal defensibility during audits and e-discovery and demonstrates proper lifecycle governance. The emphasis is on making data inaccessible while still maintaining operational efficiency and environmental responsibility.

In a cloud environment, responsibility forhardware managementshifts primarily to the cloud provider. Customers no longer manage servers, storage devices, or physical networks directly. As a result, hardware management policies are less critical for customer audits compared to data classification, procurement, or acceptable use.

Data classification remains essential to secure sensitive information. Software procurement policies are important to control licensing and compliance. Acceptable use policies govern employee behavior in cloud environments.

While organizations may still need high-level oversight of hardware through contracts and SLAs, detailed hardware policies have a reduced role. Instead, emphasis shifts to managing the shared responsibility model, ensuring cloud provider controls complement customer governance.

Reliabilityin cloud design ensures workloads can recover quickly from disruptions and continue operating as expected. This concept focuses on high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. Reliability requires implementing redundancy, backup strategies, and robust monitoring.

Security ensures data protection, operational excellence covers continuous improvement, and resource hierarchy refers to organizational structures, but none focus specifically on availability and resilience.

By prioritizing reliability, organizations design cloud architectures capable of withstanding failures at multiple layers—compute, storage, networking, and even regions. This design principle ensures customer trust and compliance with service-level agreements.

Agileis an iterative software development methodology designed to prioritize customer satisfaction, adaptability, and incremental delivery. Agile teams deliver small, working pieces of software frequently, ensuring feedback is incorporated throughout the process. This flexibility allows late-stage requirement changes to be accommodated without derailing the project.

Waterfall is a sequential approach with limited flexibility. Spiral combines iterative development with risk analysis, but it is not as customer-focused as Agile. Lean emphasizes efficiency and waste reduction but does not center on continuous delivery and adaptability.

Agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban embody this philosophy, supporting faster innovation, better collaboration, and responsiveness to evolving business needs.

The phase of software design that integrates individual code components and verifies their interoperability isTesting, specifically integration testing. After developers write and unit-test individual modules, those modules must be combined into a complete system. The testing phase ensures that these modules communicate properly, data flows correctly, and overall functionality meets requirements.

Planning establishes project goals, coding builds individual components, and training prepares users. None of these directly verify interoperability. Testing is critical because even well-functioning components may fail when combined, due to interface mismatches, unexpected data structures, or dependency issues.

Cloud-based systems often integrate microservices, APIs, and third-party services. Testing validates that these distributed components interact seamlessly. Proper testing reduces defects, supports reliability, and ensures a consistent end-user experience. It also aligns with DevOps practices, where continuous integration and automated testing pipelines quickly identify and remediate interoperability issues.

Continuous auditingin the context of Information Rights Management (IRM) allows organizations to monitor access events in real time. It records who accessed a file, when, and how often. This enables organizations to enforce accountability and detect unusual access patterns, which are crucial for both security monitoring and compliance reporting.

Automatic expiration sets a time limit on file availability, while dynamic policy control adjusts permissions based on context (such as location or device). Persistent protection ensures files remain encrypted and controlled wherever they travel. While each feature is valuable, only continuous auditing provides the tracking and visibility into usage required by the scenario.

This approach aligns with governance requirements, providing an audit trail that supports incident response and compliance with data protection regulations. Continuous auditing strengthens both operational security and accountability.

Backups are only valuable if they can be successfully restored when needed. Testing backups on a periodic basis is the only reliable way to validate their viability. Simply storing backups without testing may create a false sense of security, because corruption, misconfiguration, or incomplete backup sets can go unnoticed until a disaster occurs.

Industry best practices, such as those recommended by NIST and ISO 27031, emphasize regular backup testing as part of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Testing involves restoring data to a test environment, verifying its integrity, and ensuring that applications can use the restored data as expected.

Deleting, comparing, or replacing backups might help in managing storage efficiency, but these actions do not confirm whether the backups are usable. Periodic testing ensures alignment with company policy, regulatory requirements, and internal risk management controls. It also provides confidence to management that recovery objectives, such as RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective), can be met.

This is an example ofsocial engineering, where attackers manipulate individuals into divulging confidential information or performing actions that compromise security. In this case, the fraudulent caller convinced the help desk to disclose sensitive employee data.

Man-in-the-middle attacks involve intercepting communication between parties, escalation of privilege involves gaining higher access rights, and internal threats come from legitimate insiders. None of these fit the situation as accurately as social engineering.

Social engineering exploits human trust rather than technical vulnerabilities. Common tactics include phishing, pretexting, and phone-based fraud (vishing). Preventing such threats requires strong identity verification processes, employee awareness training, and layered authentication mechanisms. By recognizing the human element as a weak point, organizations can better prepare staff to resist manipulative tactics.

In cloud environments, the provider’s role in thechain of custodyprimarily involvescollecting and preserving digital evidencewhen incidents or investigations occur. Because providers manage the infrastructure, they have direct access to logs, storage systems, and virtual machines necessary for evidence collection.

Backup policies and incident response may involve collaboration, but they remain customer responsibilities in many service models. Data classification and analysis are business-driven tasks, which customers must handle.

Providers must ensure that evidence collection is forensically sound and documented properly to maintain legal admissibility. This responsibility is critical in maintaining trust and ensuring compliance with laws and contractual obligations. It reinforces the shared responsibility model by clearly defining which aspects of digital forensics belong to the provider.

TheZero Trustsecurity model assumes that no user, device, or application should be trusted by default, whether inside or outside the network perimeter. Every access request must be continuously verified using strict identity, authorization, and context-based checks.

Unlike traditional perimeter security, Zero Trust emphasizes the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Traffic inspection looks at data packets, intrusion prevention identifies malicious activity, and secret management safeguards sensitive keys and credentials. None of these approaches enforce constant, adaptive identity verification the way Zero Trust does.

By adopting Zero Trust, organizations ensure that access is not granted simply because a user is “inside” the network. Instead, continuous checks evaluate credentials, device posture, location, and other risk factors. This significantly reduces the risk of insider threats, credential theft, and lateral movement within cloud environments.

The method described isstriping, which is a technique used in RAID configurations to improve performance and distribute risk. Striping involves splitting data into smaller segments and writing those segments across multiple disks simultaneously. For example, if a file is divided into four parts, each part is written to a separate disk in the RAID array.

This parallelism enhances input/output (I/O) performance because multiple drives can be accessed at once. It also provides resilience depending on the RAID level. While striping by itself (RAID 0) increases performance but not redundancy, when combined with mirroring or parity (e.g., RAID 5 or RAID 10), it offers both speed and fault tolerance.

The purpose of striping in the data management context is to optimize how data is stored, accessed, and protected. It is fundamentally different from archiving, mapping, or crypto-shredding, as those serve different objectives (long-term storage, logical placement, or secure deletion). Striping is central to high-performance storage systems and supports availability in mission-critical environments.

Cryptographic erasure is a secure data sanitization technique that relies on encryption. The process involves encrypting the data, encrypting the keys with a second layer, and then destroying the encryption keys. Without the keys, the encrypted data becomes unreadable and is effectively destroyed, even though the storage media remains intact.

One-way hashing is used for password storage, not full data destruction. Degaussing is for magnetic media, and overwriting involves physically writing new data over existing sectors.

Cryptographic erasure is widely used in cloud environments where physical media cannot be easily destroyed or reclaimed by customers. It ensures compliance with data retention and privacy regulations while maintaining environmental sustainability by allowing reuse of storage hardware.

Before transmitting sensitive financial data to the cloud, the best defense against interception threats like packet capture and man-in-the-middle attacks isencryption. Encryption protects data in transit by converting plain text into cipher text, which can only be deciphered with the correct keys.

Hashing provides integrity verification but does not secure confidentiality. Change tracking monitors modifications but does not prevent interception. Metadata labeling adds context but does not protect against on-path attackers.

Using strong encryption protocols (e.g., TLS) ensures that even if traffic is intercepted, the attacker cannot read the data. Encryption also aligns with compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, which mandates encryption for financial data during transmission. By encrypting before upload, the user ensures end-to-end confidentiality across potentially insecure networks.

The correct time for data deletion isafter the specified retention perioddefined by contractual agreements, regulatory frameworks, or internal policies. Retention policies ensure that data is kept for as long as necessary for business, legal, or compliance reasons but not longer than required.

Oversubscription, inactivity, or review cycles are not valid triggers because they may conflict with compliance mandates such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS. Deleting data prematurely could result in legal penalties or business risks, while keeping it longer than necessary could increase exposure.

By deleting data only after the retention period, providers demonstrate adherence to data governance principles and protect customer rights while minimizing storage costs and liability.

Industry best practice requires that encryption keys arestored separately from the data they protect. This ensures that if the data storage system is compromised, attackers cannot immediately decrypt sensitive information. The use of a secure escrow system is a recognized approach.

An escrow provides controlled storage for encryption keys, ensuring they are only accessible by authorized processes and not co-located with the protected data. Keeping keys “local” to the data creates a single point of failure. A public or private repository without specialized protection mechanisms would also be insufficient due to risks of insider threats or misconfiguration.

By placing keys in an independent escrow system, the organization enforces separation of duties, strengthens defense-in-depth, and aligns with cryptographic standards from NIST and ISO. This practice is vital when dealing with archival data, where long-term confidentiality must be preserved even as systems evolve.