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Security and Compliance Architecture Questions

Architecting systems to meet security requirements and regulatory and compliance obligations. Candidates should understand how to embed data classification, data governance, encryption, least privilege access, audit trails and logging, secure design patterns, and threat modeling into architectures. Expect discussion of how architectural choices affect obligations under common regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and System and Organization Controls frameworks. Topics include documenting architecture for compliance reviewers, retention and data residency considerations, denial of service mitigation and web application firewall strategies, and balancing security controls with usability and operational cost. Candidates should be able to describe when to engage legal and compliance teams and how to design for auditability and evidence capture.

MediumTechnical
49 practiced
Given an e-commerce application that stores and processes payment card data, describe an approach to map PCI-DSS requirements to cloud controls. As a Cloud Architect, list key architectural controls, segmentation techniques, tokenization options, and how you'd collect evidence for an auditor.
MediumSystem Design
49 practiced
You need to protect sensitive fields (e.g., SSNs, credit card numbers) used by an enterprise application. As a Cloud Architect, design options for field-level protection including client-side encryption, envelope encryption, tokenization, and database-level encryption. Compare trade-offs for security, performance, and compliance.
EasyTechnical
47 practiced
Compare and contrast the cloud shared responsibility model across major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) at a high level. As a Cloud Architect, how do these differences affect architectural decisions for compliance and where to place application-level controls?
EasyTechnical
55 practiced
Describe the differences between encryption at rest and encryption in transit for cloud environments. As a Cloud Architect, outline key management options (cloud-provider KMS, HSM, customer-managed keys, hardware-backed keys) and when you'd choose each option for enterprise workloads.
HardSystem Design
58 practiced
Design the architecture for a continuous compliance program that provides automated control evaluation, drift detection, compliance scoring, and evidence collection across multiple cloud platforms. Describe policy enforcement, alerting, reporting, and integration points with governance and audit teams.

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