What best describes the purpose of Physical Safeguards?

• A. The mechanisms to protect electronic systems, equipment, and the data they hold from threats, environmental hazards, and unauthorized intrusion.
• B. The procedures for incident response planning.
• C. The requirements for physical facility floor plans.
• D. The guidelines for staff anti-fraud training.

Answer: (A)

Physical safeguards are about protecting hardware, software, and the data on them from physical threats and unauthorized access. The description that best fits this purpose is: mechanisms to protect electronic systems, equipment, and the data they hold from threats, environmental hazards, and unauthorized intrusion. This captures the broad role of physical safeguards in safeguarding the devices that process and store information and the information itself, by preventing physical tampering, damage from environments, and unwanted access. Other choices describe activities or focus areas that are not the overarching aim of physical safeguards—incident response planning is about responding to events (administrative/operational), floor plans are just a specific layout consideration, and staff anti-fraud training relates to workforce security or administrative controls.