Effective Study Techniques for the ISC CCSP Exam

The cloud service administrator is responsible for testing cloud services, monitoring services, administering security for services, providing usage reports on cloud services, and addressing problem reports

Popular services such as iCloud, Dropbox, and OneDrive are all publicly available and are open to any user for free, with possible add-on services offered for a cost.

The cloud service business manager is responsible for overseeing business and billing administration, purchasing cloud services, and requesting audit reports when necessary

The cloud service business manager is responsible for overseeing business plans and customer relationships as well as processing financial transactions.

The guidelines from ASHRAE establish 40-60 percent relative humidity as optimal for a data center.

Trust zones can be implemented to separate systems or tiers along logical lines for great security and access controls. Each zone can then have its own security controls and monitoring based on its particular needs.

The cloud service developer is responsible for developing and creating cloud components and services, as well as for testing and validating services.

The Uptime Institute publishes the most commonly used and widely known standard on data center tiers and topologies. It is based on a series of four tiers, with each progressive increase in number representing more stringent, reliable, and redundant systems for security, connectivity, fault tolerance, redundancy, and cooling.

iSCSI is a protocol that allows for the transmission and use of SCSI commands and features over a TCP-based network. iSCSI allows systems to use block-level storage that looks and behaves as a SAN would with physical servers, but to leverage the TCP network within a virtualized environment and cloud.

The SOAP protocol only supports the XML data format.

With static masking, a separate and distinct copy of the data set is created with masking in place. This is typically done through a script or other process that takes a standard data set, processes it to mask the appropriate and predefined fields, and then outputs the data set as a new one with the completed masking done.

A Type 2 hypervisor differs from a Type 1 hypervisor in that it runs on top of another operating system rather than directly tied into the underlying hardware of the virtual host servers. With this type of implementation, additional security and architecture concerns come into play because the interaction between the operating system and the hypervisor becomes a critical link. The hypervisor no longer has direct interaction and control over the underlying hardware, which means that some performance will be lost due to the operating system in the middle needing its own resources, patching requirements, and operational oversight.

The best practice is to totally remove any unneeded services and utilities on a system to prevent any chance of compromise or use. If they are just disabled, it is possible for them to be inadvertently started again at any point, or another exploit could be used to start them again. Removing also negates the need to patch and maintain them going forward.

DNSSEC relates to the integrity of DNS resolutions and the prevention of spoofing or redirection, and does not pertain to the actual security of transmissions or the protection of data.

With cloud providers hosting a number of different customers, it would be impractical for them to pursue additional certifications based on the needs of a specific customer. Cloud environments are built to a common denominator to serve the greatest number of customers, and especially within a public cloud model, it is not possible or practical for a cloud provider to alter their services for specific customer demands.