Free Cloud Security Alliance CCSK Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 7

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.

Volume storage encryption protects data at rest stored on virtual disks in cloud environments.

“Encryption of storage volumes protects data at rest by ensuring that unauthorized users who gain access to the storage infrastructure cannot read the data without encryption keys.”

— CSA Security Guidance v4.0 – Domain 11: Data Security and Encryption

Encryption helps maintain:

Confidentiality and integrity of stored data

Compliance with data protection regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA)

Serverless computing shifts infrastructure management responsibility to the CSP, allowing customers to focus on application logic rather than infrastructure. Reference: [Security Guidance v5, Domain 8 - Cloud Workload Security]

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].

Load balancing is a key resilience strategy in both traditional and cloud environments. It evenly distributes network or application traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server becomes a point of failure or overloaded, thereby improving system availability, performance, and fault tolerance.

In cloud infrastructure, load balancers may work at various OSI layers (Layer 4 or Layer 7) and are often integrated into cloud platforms as managed services (e.g., AWS Elastic Load Balancer or Azure Load Balancer). They play a critical role in mitigating risks like traffic spikes, system failure, or regional outages.

This technique is described in Domain 7: Infrastructure Security of the CCSK guidance, which highlights tools like load balancing, redundant systems, and failover mechanisms to support cloud resilience and availability.