VPOL flashcards
VPOL · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Type 1 hypervisor
- Virtualization layer that runs directly on physical hardware without a host operating system, reducing overhead and attack surface compared with hosted virtualization.
- RTO versus RPO
- Recovery time objective is the maximum acceptable outage duration; recovery point objective is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time before the failure.
- RAID 6 tolerance
- Striping with dual parity that survives the simultaneous failure of any two member disks, at the cost of extra parity writes and reduced usable capacity.
- Object storage
- Data model storing opaque objects in flat buckets, addressed by key over HTTP APIs, suited to unstructured data and scale-out rather than low-latency block access.
- 3-2-1 backup rule
- Keep three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy stored offsite, so a single site or media failure cannot destroy all copies.
- Load balancer health check
- Periodic probe that tests backend responsiveness and removes failing nodes from the rotation, preventing traffic from reaching unhealthy servers.
- SaaS responsibility boundary
- In software as a service the provider manages infrastructure, runtime, and application; the customer retains identity, data, and configuration responsibilities.
- N+1 redundancy
- Design in which one additional component beyond the minimum required to serve demand is provisioned, so a single component failure causes no service loss.
- CAP theorem
- Distributed systems facing a network partition must sacrifice either strict consistency or availability; partition tolerance is assumed for any networked system.
- Idempotent operation
- An operation that produces the same result whether executed once or repeatedly, making safe retries possible after timeouts or ambiguous failures.
- DMZ segmentation
- Network zone holding internet-facing services, separated from internal networks by firewalls so a compromised public host cannot directly reach internal systems.
- Blue-green deployment
- Two identical environments where traffic switches from the live blue to the prepared green release, enabling fast rollback by switching back.
- Canary release
- Deployment pattern routing a small percentage of traffic to a new version first, then expanding exposure only if health and error metrics remain acceptable.
- Stateless tier design
- Application servers hold no session data between requests, so any node can serve any request and capacity scales horizontally without session affinity.
- Least privilege
- Security principle granting only the permissions required for a task, for only as long as needed, and reviewing entitlements regularly to remove excess access.
- Defense in depth
- Layering independent preventive, detective, and corrective controls so that failure or bypass of one control does not expose the whole environment.
- Authentication versus authorization
- Authentication confirms who a subject is; authorization determines which resources and actions that authenticated subject is permitted to use.
- Incident response phases
- Structured sequence of preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident lessons learned used to manage security incidents.
- CVSS base score
- Numeric severity rating derived from attack vector, attack complexity, privileges required, user interaction, and confidentiality, integrity, and availability impact.
- Data classification
- Assigning data to tiers such as public, internal, confidential, or restricted, which then determines encryption, access, retention, and handling requirements.
- Encryption in transit
- Protecting data on the network with protocols such as TLS so interception between client and server yields ciphertext rather than readable payload.
- Incident priority
- Ranking derived from business impact and urgency that sets the response and resolution targets applied to an incident or service request.
- MTTR formula
- Mean time to repair equals total downtime divided by the number of incidents; lower values indicate faster restoration of service after failures.
- Known error
- A problem whose root cause has been identified but not permanently resolved, documented with a workaround so the service desk can restore service faster.
- Emergency change
- Expedited change executed to restore service or close a critical vulnerability, approved through a fast path and reviewed retrospectively afterward.
- Functional escalation
- Transferring an incident to a team or specialist with greater technical skill or access rights when the current tier cannot resolve it.
- Blameless post-incident review
- Structured retrospective focused on system and process causes rather than individual fault, producing tracked corrective actions with owners and due dates.
- SLA versus OLA
- A service level agreement is a contractual commitment to a customer; an operational level agreement is an internal commitment between teams supporting that external promise.
- Risk formula
- Risk is commonly expressed as likelihood multiplied by impact, and each risk is answered by mitigating, transferring, avoiding, or formally accepting it.
- Capex versus opex
- Capital expenditure funds long-lived assets and is depreciated over time; operating expenditure covers recurring consumption such as cloud subscriptions and support.
- Policy hierarchy
- Descending set of governance documents: policy states mandatory intent, standards give specific requirements, procedures give steps, and guidelines give recommendations.
- Vendor due diligence
- Pre-contract assessment of a supplier's security controls, financial stability, data residency, and exit or portability terms before commitment.