ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Question

Because the data reside in a relational (structured) database, the quickest and most accurate way to discover PII is to query the database's system catalog to obtain table and column definitions, data types, and any existing sensitivity or classification tags. Leveraging this metadata lets a discovery tool focus directly on columns likely to contain PII (for example, CHAR(9) columns named SSN or customer_ssn), reducing the need for pattern matching across every row and thus minimizing false positives.

Scanning exported flat files with regular expressions can locate patterns but typically produces many false positives and misses context such as column semantics. Network DLP only observes data in motion; it does not enumerate where data are stored inside the database. Applying homomorphic encryption is a protection technique, not a discovery method, and would actually make content inspection impossible unless decrypted first. Therefore, using the database catalog and schema metadata is the most appropriate discovery technique for structured data.