Objective 3.2

PCA

Designing for compliance

Objective 3.2 sits in Designing for security and compliance, which carries 17.5% of the Cloud Architect exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Google Cloud page it rests on.

Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Google Cloud exam page

A worked example

Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.

3-2Designing for security and compliance

A project has no organization policy defined anywhere in its hierarchy, yet an operation is refused as restricted. What accounts for that refusal?

Policies cannot be inherited across foldersFolders are part of the inheritance chain rather than a break in it.
A Google-managed default already restricts itCorrect · your answerCorrect. Some rules arrive already switched on.
An unset constraint always denies by defaultMost constraints do nothing until somebody enforces them.
The project inherits the last policy deletedA deleted policy leaves nothing behind to inherit.

Correct.

Concept

Absence of a policy is not the same as absence of a rule, so an inventory of what a hierarchy enforces has to include behaviour that ships switched on.

Why B

Where a constraint has a Google-managed default behaviour that restricts an operation, that operation is restricted even if no organization policy was ever defined, and allowing it means creating a policy that overrides the parent.

Source

If the Google-managed default behavior of an organization policy constraint restricts an operation, then that operation is restricted even if you never explicitly defined an organization policy. To allow those operations, you must create organization policies that override the parent policy.

Organization policy constraints, Resource Manager documentation, checked August 2026
#gcp#organization-policy#compliance#defaults

Now you: objective 3.2 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 3

3-2Designing for security and compliance

A team enforces the constraint that blocks project-wide SSH keys and finds several existing VMs still accepting them. What accounts for that?

Sample question 2 of 3

3-2Designing for security and compliance

A compliance rule requires every new VLAN attachment in the organization to be encrypted. What does the list constraint need?

Sample question 3 of 3

3-2Designing for security and compliance

An organization enforces the constraint that denies external IP addresses on VM instances, then finds one instance still reachable over IPv6. What explains that?

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Read the sources

These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.

More objectives in Designing for security and compliance