Which of the following provides the BEST protection for sensitive information stored in cloud-based services while allowing data functionality?

Data encryption is the most effective method for protecting sensitive information stored in cloud-based services while ensuring data functionality. With encryption, data is transformed into a format that cannot be easily understood without the proper decryption key, thus safeguarding it from unauthorized access. This means that even if an attacker gains access to the cloud storage, they would only encounter encrypted data, significantly reducing the risk of data breaches.

Encryption allows users to maintain the usability of their data since the information remains intact and accessible to authorized parties who possess the necessary keys to decrypt it. This combination of robust security and operational functionality makes encryption an optimal choice for protecting sensitive cloud-stored data.

Other methods like data masking and anonymization focus on obfuscating sensitive information but may hinder the dataset's functionality and usability. Data masking alters data to prevent its disclosure but still produces results that may not be as relevant or useful for analysis. Anonymization removes any identifiable information, making it difficult to connect data back to an individual, limiting its practical applications. Tokenization, while adding a layer of security by replacing sensitive data with non-sensitive equivalents (tokens), also involves complexities in maintaining the mapping between original and tokenized data, which can affect functionality.

Thus, encryption stands out as the best practice to balance