Which option best contrasts the three states of data that protection strategies are normally designed to address?
- AData at rest is stored on removable media, data in transit moves between datacentres, and data in use is the subset of records currently held by a specific business owner.
- BData at rest is unencrypted by default, data in transit is encrypted by TLS, and data in use is anonymised through tokenisation before any function reads it.
- CData at rest is held on persistent storage, data in transit is moving across a network path, and data in use is loaded into application memory or CPU registers for active processing. Correct
- DData at rest is structured records in a database, data in transit is unstructured streams over the network, and data in use is the cached copy held by a content delivery network.
Why A is wrong: Rest is not limited to removable media, transit is not restricted to datacentre links, and the in-use state is about active processing rather than business ownership.
Why B is wrong: The three states describe lifecycle position, not the controls applied; encryption and tokenisation are mitigations that may or may not be present in each state.
Why C is correct: The three states differ by where the data lives at a point in time, which determines the relevant protection mechanism such as disk encryption, transport encryption, or memory protection.
Why D is wrong: Structure and CDN caching are not what define the states; the distinction is whether the data is stored, moving, or being processed at the moment in question.