Hard1 markMultiple Choice
Domain 3: Designing for Security and ComplianceDomain 3Cloud DLPPCI-DSSSecurity
This question is part of a case study — click to read the full scenario(Case 06)

CASE STUDY: TrendWear Apparel

Company Overview:
TrendWear Apparel is a global clothing retailer with an e-commerce platform and 500 physical stores.

Current Technical Environment:

  • On-premises VMware environment
  • Legacy IBM Mainframe for core inventory management
  • Monolithic e-commerce application running on VMs

Business Requirements:

  • Modernize the e-commerce platform to handle Black Friday (10x normal traffic)
  • Unify online and in-store inventory data in real-time
  • Avoid major capital expenditure (CapEx) for data center refreshes

Executive Statements:

  • CEO: "We need an omnichannel experience. Customers should see accurate store inventory online."
  • CFO: "We must shift from CapEx to OpEx. No more buying hardware."
  • CTO: "We want to move to microservices, but we cannot retire the mainframe for at least 3 years due to complex legacy dependencies."

Technical Requirements:

  • Hybrid architecture connecting GCP and on-premises
  • Microservices architecture for the new e-commerce platform
  • PCI-DSS compliance for all payment processing
  • Consistent management plane across on-prem and cloud

Constraints:

  • Mainframe must remain on-premises
  • E-commerce migration must be completed before the next holiday season (8 months)

QUESTION:
Based on the CTO's requirement for a consistent management plane across on-premises and the cloud, and the need to modernize to microservices while keeping the mainframe, which compute architecture should you recommend?

GCP PCA · Question 08 · Domain 3: Designing for Security and Compliance

CASE STUDY: TrendWear Apparel

Company Overview:
TrendWear Apparel is a global clothing retailer with an e-commerce platform and 500 physical stores.

Current Technical Environment:

  • On-premises VMware environment
  • Legacy IBM Mainframe for core inventory management
  • Monolithic e-commerce application running on VMs

Business Requirements:

  • Modernize the e-commerce platform to handle Black Friday (10x normal traffic)
  • Unify online and in-store inventory data in real-time
  • Avoid major capital expenditure (CapEx) for data center refreshes

Executive Statements:

  • CEO: "We need an omnichannel experience. Customers should see accurate store inventory online."
  • CFO: "We must shift from CapEx to OpEx. No more buying hardware."
  • CTO: "We want to move to microservices, but we cannot retire the mainframe for at least 3 years due to complex legacy dependencies."

Technical Requirements:

  • Hybrid architecture connecting GCP and on-premises
  • Microservices architecture for the new e-commerce platform
  • PCI-DSS compliance for all payment processing
  • Consistent management plane across on-prem and cloud

Constraints:

  • Mainframe must remain on-premises
  • E-commerce migration must be completed before the next holiday season (8 months)

QUESTION:
To meet the PCI-DSS compliance requirement, the security team wants to ensure that raw credit card numbers are never stored in the cloud databases. How should you design the data ingestion pipeline?

Answer options:

A.

Encrypt the database using Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK).

B.

Use the Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API to tokenize credit card numbers before they are written to the database.

C.

Store the credit card numbers in Secret Manager.

D.

Configure VPC Service Controls to block external access to the database.

How to approach this question

The requirement is to *never store raw credit card numbers*. Tokenization or masking is required. Cloud DLP is the GCP service designed for this exact purpose.

Full Answer

B.Use the Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API to tokenize credit card numbers before they are written to the database.✓ Correct
Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) provides real-time tokenization (de-identification) of sensitive data. By tokenizing the Primary Account Numbers (PAN) before they hit the database, the database itself falls out of the strict PCI-DSS scope for storing raw cardholder data, simplifying compliance.

Common mistakes

Choosing CMEK (A) is a common mistake. Encryption at rest is required by PCI-DSS, but it doesn't satisfy the prompt's specific requirement to avoid storing the *raw* numbers in the database.

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