Question

A financial services company stores seven years of customer transaction archives in a cloud object storage bucket that is shared across multiple tenants under the provider's control. A customer whose retention period has legally expired requests that their specific archived data be rendered permanently unrecoverable. Because the underlying storage media is multitenant and physical destruction is impossible, which approach BEST guarantees the data is effectively destroyed?

Accepted Answer

Encrypt each customer's data with a unique key and destroy that customer's encryption key (crypto-shredding)

Answer

Overwrite the customer's objects multiple times with random data (data wiping) before issuing the delete command

Answer

Delete the object metadata pointers so the storage system can no longer locate the archived files

Answer

Apply data masking to the archived records so the original values can no longer be read