CCSP Legal, Risk, and Compliance Practice Question
A cloud customer is considering adopting a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in. Which risk is this strategy primarily intended to mitigate?
⚠ Common exam trap
CCSP often tests the difference between concentration risk and third-party risk, so candidates must recognize that multi-cloud is a diversification strategy specifically aimed at reducing dependence on one provider.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Concentration risk
A multi-cloud strategy is primarily intended to mitigate concentration risk—the risk of over-reliance on a single provider, which can lead to systemic failures, vendor lock-in, and limited negotiating power. By distributing workloads across multiple providers, an organization reduces the impact of an outage, pricing change, or security incident at any one provider. This diversification is a classic risk management technique.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Third-party risk from a specific provider
Why it's wrong here
Third-party risk from a specific provider is precisely what multi-cloud mitigates: distributing workloads across independent providers reduces exposure to one vendor's outage, pricing change or failure. It fails here only because the stem asks which risk the strategy is primarily intended to mitigate, and lock-in is that stated driver.
- ✓
Concentration risk
Why this is correct
Multi-cloud spreads workloads across independent providers, so an outage, pricing change, or failure at one provider cannot disrupt all services. This directly reduces concentration risk—dependence on a single vendor—rather than portability, compliance, or interoperability concerns.
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Residual risk after controls
Why it's wrong here
Residual risk is whatever remains after controls are applied, and it exists regardless of how many providers are used; multi-cloud can even widen the attack surface. It tempts because adopting a strategy does change the residual position, but lock-in is the risk the stem names.
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Inherent risk of data leaving premises
Why it's wrong here
Data leaving premises is a residency and sovereignty concern, addressed by contractual clauses, regional deployment and encryption, not by provider count. Multi-cloud targets concentration on one vendor. It tempts because multi-cloud does spread data across jurisdictions, but that increases, rather than mitigates, this risk.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISC2 exam blueprint
This CCSP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CCSP exam.