Free Practice Questions for WGU Managing-Cloud-Security Exam

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.

The correct answer iselectronic discovery (e-discovery). This process involves identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) that may serve as evidence in legal proceedings. E-discovery ensures that relevant data such as emails, logs, or documents is preserved and made available in a legally defensible manner.

Chain of custody refers to documenting the handling of evidence once collected, while forensic imaging creates exact copies of digital media. Gap analysis identifies weaknesses in processes but is unrelated to evidence collection.

E-discovery is essential in both corporate and cloud contexts, as data is often distributed across multiple environments. Cloud providers may assist customers with e-discovery by providing tools for searching, tagging, and exporting relevant data. A sound e-discovery process ensures compliance with legal obligations and prevents spoliation of evidence.

Bollardsare physical barriers designed to prevent vehicles from ramming into or breaching secure facilities. They are often placed at entrances, around perimeters, or in front of critical infrastructure like data centers.

Locks, cameras, and fences provide important physical security, but they cannot stop a high-speed vehicle from causing damage. Cameras record activity, fences create boundaries, and locks secure access points, but only bollards physically block or mitigate vehicle attacks.

Governmental and critical infrastructure sites commonly deploy bollards to protect against both accidental collisions and deliberate vehicle-borne attacks. Combined with layered security measures—such as surveillance and fencing—they enhance resilience against physical threats to sensitive data centers.

Content-based discoveryinvolves searching within the actual text or binary content of documents to find matches for keywords, phrases, or patterns. In e-discovery, when the requirement is to locate documents containing a specific phrase, searching based on content is the most direct and reliable method.

Other approaches, such as metadata-based discovery, only examine properties like creation date or author, which do not reveal the presence of specific text. Label-based discovery relies on pre-applied classification labels, which may not always be accurate. Location-based discovery limits searches to folders or storage locations but does not guarantee relevance.

Content-based discovery provides completeness in legal and regulatory investigations. It ensures that no relevant documents are overlooked simply because of inconsistent labeling or metadata, thus supporting compliance and defensibility in court proceedings.

In Agile development,user storiesare the standard way to capture requirements for new features or improvements. A user story describes the functionality from the perspective of the end user, ensuring that development aligns with business needs.

“Cases” might refer to test cases, which validate requirements, but they are not used to describe them. Cookies are technical elements for web sessions, and notes are informal documentation.

User stories typically follow a format such as:“As a [role], I want [goal] so that [benefit].”This provides clarity, fosters communication between developers and stakeholders, and ensures that acceptance criteria can be defined and tested. Using stories as a requirement tool aligns with iterative, customer-focused release cycles.

Indirect identifiersare pieces of information that may not identify an individual on their own but, when combined with other data, can uniquely identify someone. Examples include birthdate, ZIP code, or gender. Together, these can re-identify a person, even when names or direct identifiers are removed.

Direct identifiers (such as Social Security numbers) uniquely identify an individual alone. Data subjects are the individuals to whom the data refers, while personal details is too broad and not a formal term.

Understanding indirect identifiers is essential in privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, where pseudonymization or anonymization must account for potential re-identification risks. Safeguarding indirect identifiers reduces the chance of privacy violations and unauthorized profiling.

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.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers fundamental computing resources over the cloud. These include virtual machines, block storage, networking, and load balancers. Customers use these resources to build and manage custom IT solutions, while the provider manages the underlying hardware.

PaaS abstracts infrastructure further, providing a development environment for applications without requiring infrastructure management. SaaS delivers fully functional applications over the internet. NaaS is a narrower category focusing on network delivery.

IaaS is the correct answer because it gives maximum flexibility and control compared to the other models, allowing organizations to build tailored environments. It also requires customers to manage operating systems, middleware, and runtime security, making shared responsibility an essential part of the model.

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.

Cloudsecurity groupstypically filter traffic based onports and protocols. By allowing or denying specific port/protocol combinations, engineers can control communication between deployments. For example, permitting HTTPS (TCP port 443) while blocking other ports enforces segmentation.

MAC addresses are not used in cloud-level segmentation because they apply to physical networks. Unique identifiers and definitions are not practical mechanisms for traffic filtering.

Using ports and protocols aligns with the principle of least privilege by ensuring that only necessary communication pathways exist. In multi-deployment or hybrid cloud setups, this reduces the attack surface and prevents lateral movement by malicious actors. Security groups thereby provide logical network segmentation without requiring physical infrastructure changes.