Related Technologies & Strategies
The surrounding landscape
The exam expects literate awareness rather than depth of adjacent topics: big data and analytics pipelines, where data gravity and residency bite; IoT, with hard device-identity problems, weak update paths, and edge processing; containers and orchestration; serverless; edge computing; machine learning, including training-data exposure and model theft; blockchain, whose immutability conflicts with erasure obligations; confidential computing; and post-quantum planning.
Strategies that keep appearing
Cloud access security brokers discover and govern shadow SaaS, operating in forward or reverse proxy mode, API mode, or log-based mode. SASE and SD-WAN converge networking and security at the edge. Zero trust means no implicit trust from network location: verify explicitly, apply least privilege, assume breach. Microsegmentation, security as code, shadow-IT discovery, and treating the CI/CD pipeline as a production system all recur.
How to answer
These questions usually test whether you can map a new technology onto the shared responsibility model. Ask: which abstraction layer is this, who operates it, what identity does it carry, where does its data live, and what happens when it fails or is decommissioned?
Traps
- Proxy-based CASB requires traffic to route through the vendor; API-mode CASB sees only what the SaaS API exposes.
- IoT devices rarely support MFA or endpoint agents, so compensate with network segmentation.
- Blockchain immutability conflicts with data-deletion rights under privacy regulation.
- Zero trust is an architecture and policy model, not a purchasable product.
Rule of thumb
New technology, old question: whose layer is it, and where is the data?