Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam

Which Google Cloud solution allows for managing encryption keys that must be stored in multiple regions for redundancy?

1. Cloud KMS

2. Customer-managed encryption keys

3. External Key Manager

4. Cloud Storage encryption

The correct answer is: Customer-managed encryption keys

The correct choice highlights the importance of managing encryption keys in a manner that supports redundancy across multiple regions. By utilizing customer-managed encryption keys, organizations can maintain control over their own encryption processes and keys while ensuring that these keys are replicated and managed in multiple Google Cloud regions. This enables effective data protection strategies and compliance with regulatory requirements that may dictate the need for redundancy in key management. Customer-managed encryption keys provide the flexibility to define key rotation policies, access controls, and auditing capabilities, which are essential for maintaining a secure cloud environment. Furthermore, they enable organizations to align their encryption practices with their internal security policies while leveraging the distributed nature of Google Cloud. Other options, while relevant to encryption, do not specifically address the requirement for managing multiple regional storage of encryption keys as effectively. Cloud KMS, mentioned in the choices, is a powerful service for key management, but it is the customer-managed approach that emphasizes the redundancy aspect needed in this context. External Key Manager and Cloud Storage encryption also serve specific purposes within the Google Cloud security framework, but they do not specifically cater to the need for multi-region key management as directly as customer-managed encryption keys.