Medium1 markMultiple Choice
This question is part of a case study — click to read the full scenario(Case 11)

CASE STUDY: CareData Health

Company Overview:
CareData Health is a large healthcare provider network operating 50 hospitals. They manage petabytes of patient records, medical imaging, and telemetry data.

Current Technical Environment:

  • Decentralized on-premises data centers at each hospital
  • Legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems
  • Fragmented data silos preventing holistic patient views

Business Requirements:

  • Centralize patient data into a single secure data lake
  • Enable machine learning for predictive diagnostics
  • Securely share anonymized data with external research partners

Executive Statements:

  • CEO: "We must leverage AI to improve patient outcomes and reduce readmission rates."
  • CISO: "Zero tolerance for data breaches. Patient data must be encrypted everywhere, and we must prevent any unauthorized data exfiltration."
  • DPO (Data Protection Officer): "We must strictly adhere to HIPAA in the US and GDPR for our European patients. Data residency is mandatory."

Technical Requirements:

  • End-to-end encryption using keys managed by CareData
  • Strict access controls and comprehensive audit logging
  • Ingestion of HL7 and FHIR healthcare data formats
  • Physical separation of EU and US data

Constraints:

  • Highly regulated environment
  • Legacy systems cannot be modified, only integrated with

QUESTION:
To meet the CISO's requirement of preventing unauthorized data exfiltration from the centralized data lake (BigQuery and Cloud Storage), which security control should you implement?

GCP PCA · Question 12 · Domain 3: Designing for Security and Compliance

CASE STUDY: CareData Health

Company Overview:
CareData Health is a large healthcare provider network operating 50 hospitals. They manage petabytes of patient records, medical imaging, and telemetry data.

Current Technical Environment:

  • Decentralized on-premises data centers at each hospital
  • Legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems
  • Fragmented data silos preventing holistic patient views

Business Requirements:

  • Centralize patient data into a single secure data lake
  • Enable machine learning for predictive diagnostics
  • Securely share anonymized data with external research partners

Executive Statements:

  • CEO: "We must leverage AI to improve patient outcomes and reduce readmission rates."
  • CISO: "Zero tolerance for data breaches. Patient data must be encrypted everywhere, and we must prevent any unauthorized data exfiltration."
  • DPO (Data Protection Officer): "We must strictly adhere to HIPAA in the US and GDPR for our European patients. Data residency is mandatory."

Technical Requirements:

  • End-to-end encryption using keys managed by CareData
  • Strict access controls and comprehensive audit logging
  • Ingestion of HL7 and FHIR healthcare data formats
  • Physical separation of EU and US data

Constraints:

  • Highly regulated environment
  • Legacy systems cannot be modified, only integrated with

QUESTION:
To satisfy the technical requirement for encryption using keys managed by CareData, how should you configure encryption for the Cloud Storage buckets and BigQuery datasets?

Answer options:

A.

Rely on Google's default encryption at rest.

B.

Implement Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) using Cloud Key Management Service (KMS).

C.

Implement Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEK) by storing the keys on an on-premises HSM.

D.

Encrypt the data within the application layer before sending it to GCP.

How to approach this question

Match the requirement 'keys managed by CareData' to the GCP encryption options. Default encryption = Google manages. CMEK = Customer manages via KMS. CSEK = Customer provides raw key material.

Full Answer

B.Implement Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) using Cloud Key Management Service (KMS).✓ Correct
Implement Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) using Cloud Key Management Service (KMS).
Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) via Cloud KMS is the standard solution for regulated industries. It gives the organization cryptographic control over their data (they can destroy the key to instantly crypto-shred the data) while still allowing GCP services like BigQuery to process the data natively.

Common mistakes

Choosing CSEK (C). CSEK requires the customer to provide the raw key material with every API call. It is highly complex, prone to error, and not supported by all services (like BigQuery). CMEK is the preferred architectural choice.

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