ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Question

Object storage is designed for durability, with multiple replicated copies that may reside on different disks, appliances, and even facilities. When an organization relies on the provider's delete calls alone, remnants of those replicas can persist outside the customer's view. This residual data, known as data remanence or incomplete deletion, violates requirements that audit logs be permanently destroyed after seven years. While concerns such as vendor lock-in, resource contention, and hypervisor escape are real, they are not unique to long-term object storage or directly tied to end-of-life data handling. Therefore, data remanence is the primary threat that must be mitigated through verifiable sanitization methods, cryptographic erasure, or destruction certificates.