Which of the following items is one of the major regulatory compliance problems associated with cloud environments?

The cost of cloud services has no recognized connection to computer service embargoes; this is not an established regulatory compliance concern in cloud computing.

Delivering applications as a service does not inherently violate software licensing agreements because cloud service models have their own distinct and legally recognized licensing structures.

Improved transparency through centralized management is a security and operational benefit of cloud environments, not a compliance problem.

Cloud providers replicate and distribute data across data centers in multiple regions or countries to ensure availability and redundancy, often without the customer explicitly controlling where each copy resides. Regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and various national data sovereignty laws impose strict requirements on where certain categories of regulated data may be stored or transferred. The inherently distributed nature of cloud storage can cause unintentional cross-border data transfers that violate these geographic restrictions, creating direct regulatory liability.

Multi-tenancy involves logical isolation of customer data through software controls, not physical sharing of hard drives, making this statement a technical misrepresentation of how cloud multi-tenancy operates.