Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Exam

Which technology enables cloud computing to become a scalable service offering?

1. Artificial Intelligence

2. Blockchain

3. Data Mining

4. Virtualization

The correct answer is: Virtualization

The ability of cloud computing to provide scalable service offerings is fundamentally driven by virtualization technology. Virtualization allows physical hardware resources to be divided into multiple virtual instances, enabling efficient and flexible resource management. This abstraction layer creates an environment where various services, applications, and workloads can be run independently across a shared hardware infrastructure. Through virtualization, organizations can dynamically allocate resources based on demand, scaling services up or down as needed without the constraints of physical servers. This not only enhances efficiency and utilization of resources but also enables rapid deployment and provisioning of new services, which is crucial in a cloud environment. While other technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data mining have their roles in cloud environments—such as optimizing operations, securing transactions, or extracting insights from data—they do not directly contribute to the fundamental scalability characteristics that virtualization provides. Virtualization remains the cornerstone that allows cloud computing to deliver elastic and on-demand resources effectively.