as well. For example, if a company sends a digital purchase order, the recipient should be expected to send a signed acknowledgment proving that they received it. This kind of nonrepudiation requirement may occur with external business processes.
Business and other organizations will often monitor the progress of projects and the efficiency and profitability of lines of business using success measures, such as KPIs and ROI.
Exam Essentials
Study the case studies: EHR Healthcare, Helicopter Racing League, Mountkirk Games, and TerramEarth. You will have access to the case studies during the exam, but you can save time if you are already familiar with the details of each. Also, think through the implications of the business requirements to understand how they constrain technical solution options.
Understand business terms like total cost of ownership (TCO), key performance indicators (KPIs), and return on investment (ROI). You will almost certainly not have to calculate any of these measures, but you should understand what they measure and why they are used by business executives and analysts.
Learn about Google Cloud Platform managed services and for what purposes they are used. These services can be used instead of deploying and managing applications and managing servers, storage, networking, and so forth. If a business requirement includes using managed services or reducing the workload on a DevOps team, you may be able to use one or more of these services to solve problems presented on the exam.
Understand the elements of data management. This includes how much data will be collected and stored, how long it will be stored, what processing will be applied to it, and who will have access to it.
Understand how compliance with regulations can introduce additional business requirements. Businesses and organizations may be subject to one or more regulations. Part of analyzing business requirements is to understand which, if any, regulations require compliance.
Understand the three main aspects of security with respect to business requirements. They are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality focuses on limiting access to data to those who have a legitimate business need for it. Integrity ensures that data is not tampered with or corrupted in ways that could enable fraud or other misuse. Availability addresses the need to prevent malicious acts from disrupting access to services.
Know why decision-makers use success measures. Two well-known success measures are KPIs and ROI. KPIs are measures that are specific to a business operation. ROI is a general measure based on the cost of an investment versus the additional benefit realized because of that investment.
Review Questions
1 In the TerramEarth case study, the volume of data and compute load will be most affected by what characteristics of the TerramEarth systems?The number of dealers and customersThe number of vehicles, the number of sensors on vehicles, network connectivity, and the types of data collectedThe type of storage usedCompliance with regulations
2 You have received complaints from customers about long wait times while loading application pages in their browsers, especially pages with several images. Your director has tasked you with reducing latency when accessing and transmitting data to a client device outside the cloud. Which of the following would you use? (Choose two.)Multiregional storageColdline storageCDNCloud Pub/SubCloud Dataflow
3 Mountkirk Games will analyze game players' usage patterns. This will require collecting time-series data including game state. What database would be a good option for doing this?BigQueryBigtableCloud SpannerCloud Storage
4 You have been hired to consult with a new data warehouse team. They are struggling to meet schedules because they repeatedly find problems with data quality and must write preprocessing scripts to clean the data. What managed service would you recommend for addressing these problems?Cloud DataflowCloud DataprocCloud DataprepCloud Datastore
5 You have deployed an application that receives data from sensors on manufacturing equipment. Sometimes more data arrives than can be processed by the current set of Compute Engine instances. Business managers do not want to run additional VMs. What changes could you make to ensure that data is not lost because it cannot be processed as it is sent from the equipment? Assume that business managers want the lowest-cost solution.Write data to local SSDs on the Compute Engine VMs.Write data to Cloud Memorystore and have the application read data from the cache.Write data from the equipment to a Cloud Pub/Sub queue and have the application read data from the queue.Tune the application to run faster.
6 Your company uses Apache Spark for data science applications. Your manager has asked you to investigate running Spark in the cloud. Your manager's goal is to lower the overall cost of running and managing Spark. What would you recommend?Run Apache Spark in Compute Engine.Use Cloud Dataproc with preemptible virtual machines.Use Cloud Data Fusion.Use Cloud Memorystore with Apache Spark running in Compute Engine.
7 You are working with a U.S. hospital to extract data from a legacy electronic health record (EHR) system. The hospital has offered to provide business requirements, but there is little information about regulations in the documented business requirements. What regulations would you look to for more guidance on complying with relevant regulations?GDPRSOXHIPAAPCI DSS
8 What security control can be used to help detect changes to data?Firewall rulesMessage digestsAuthenticationAuthorization
9 Your company has a data classification scheme for categorizing data as secret, sensitive, private, and public. There are no confidentiality requirements for public data. All other data must be encrypted at rest. Secret data must be encrypted with keys that the company controls. Sensitive and private data can be encrypted with keys managed by a third party. Data will be stored in GCP. What would you recommend to meet these requirements while minimizing cost and administrative overhead?Use Cloud KMS to manage keys for all data.Use Cloud KMS for secret data and Google default encryption for other data.Use Google default encryption for all data.Use a custom encryption algorithm for all data.
10 You manage a service with several databases. The queries to the relational database are increasing in latency. Reducing the amount of data in tables will improve performance and reduce latency. The application administrator has determined that approximately 60 percent of the data in the database is more than 90 days old and has never been queried and does not need to be in the database. You are required to keep the data for five years in case it is requested by auditors. What would you propose to decrease query latency without increasing costs—or at least keeping any cost increases to a minimum?Horizontally scale the relational database.Vertically scale the relational database.Export data more than 90 days old, store it in Cloud Storage Archive class storage, and delete that data from the relational database.Export data more than 90 days old, store it in Cloud Storage multiregional class storage, and delete that data from the relational database.
11 Your company is running several custom applications that were written by developers who are no longer with the company. The applications frequently fail. The DevOps team is paged more for these applications than any others. You propose replacing those applications with several managed services in GCP. A manager who is reviewing your cost estimates for using managed services in GCP notes that the cost of the managed services will be more than what they pay for internal servers. What would you recommend as the next step for the manager?Nothing. The manager is correct—the costs are higher. You should reconsider your recommendation.Suggest that the manager calculate total cost of ownership, which includes the cost to support the applications as well as infrastructure costs.Recommend running the custom applications in Compute Engine to lower costs.Recommend rewriting
