WGU Updated Managing-Cloud-Security Exam Questions and Answers by aaminah

The Public cloud model is owned and operated by a vendor and offered to customers through sale, lease, or rental arrangements. Managing Cloud principles describe public cloud providers as entities that deliver shared infrastructure, platforms, or applications to multiple customers over the internet.

In this model, the cloud service provider manages the infrastructure, maintenance, and security of the environment, while customers consume services on a pay-as-you-go or subscription basis. Public clouds offer scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency but provide less control over underlying systems.

Private clouds are dedicated to a single organization, hybrid clouds combine multiple models, and community clouds serve specific groups. Therefore, the public cloud model best fits the description.

Dedicated memory allocation ensures isolation between virtual machines in a shared environment. Without memory isolation, remnants of one VM’s operations might remain in physical memory and be accessible to another VM, leading to cross-tenant data leakage. Assigning dedicated memory prevents attackers from exploiting memory-sharing vulnerabilities.

Encrypted network protocols protect data in transit, not memory. Encrypted file systems safeguard storage, not volatile memory. A dedicated processor helps with performance and isolation of compute tasks but does not secure temporary memory contents.

Cloud environments are multi-tenant, which makes memory isolation a critical safeguard. By dedicating memory or enforcing strict hypervisor-level isolation, providers prevent data exposure between customers. This aligns with best practices for virtualization security and the “resource pooling” characteristic of cloud computing, ensuring that shared infrastructure does not compromise confidentiality.

The Zero Trust security 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.

A core goal of OS baseline compliance and monitoring is to ensure that virtual images and operating systems adhere to approved baseline configuration requirements. Managing Cloud documentation explains that baseline configurations define secure settings for operating systems, including disabled services, patch levels, access controls, and logging configurations.

Compliance monitoring continuously verifies that systems remain aligned with these baselines over time. This helps detect unauthorized changes, configuration drift, or misconfigurations that could introduce vulnerabilities. Ensuring that virtual images meet baseline standards before deployment also reduces risk across scaled cloud environments.

The other options relate to availability, network isolation, or data separation, which are addressed by different controls. Therefore, ensuring baseline configuration compliance is the primary goal of OS baseline monitoring.