ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Question

Ephemeral (instance-attached) storage is provisioned on physical disks that are directly attached to the hypervisor host. Cloud providers automatically wipe this storage when the associated virtual machine is stopped, terminated, or migrated, eliminating residual-data concerns and avoiding charges once the instance is gone-making it ideal for short-lived, non-persistent data such as session caches.

Long-term object storage classes are designed for durable retention and charge for both capacity and retrieval; using them for transient cache files would increase cost and leave data remnants unless explicitly deleted. Raw block storage mapped directly to physical devices is intended for workloads that need persistent low-level disk access (for example, databases) and normally remains allocated until manually detached, so cached data could persist inadvertently. A network file share on durable distributed storage is likewise persistent, incurs additional latency, and would retain the session data beyond the VM's life. Therefore, ephemeral storage best satisfies the requirements of low cost and automatic data destruction.