Regulated PII data carries legal and jurisdictional requirements, along with official penalties for its misuse or disclosure, which can be either civil or criminal in nature. Legal and protected are similar terms, but neither is the correct answer in this case. Contractual requirements can carry financial or contractual impacts for the improper use or disclosure of PII data, but not legal or criminal penalties that are officially enforced.

Explanation
Application virtualization is a software implementation that allows applications and programs to run in an isolated environment rather than directly interacting with the operating system. Sandboxing refers to segregating information or processes for security or testing purposes, but it's not directly related to isolation from the underlying operating system. Abstracting sounds similar to the correct term but is not pertinent to the question, and hosting is provided as an erroneous answer.

Explanation
The Safe Harbor regulations were developed by the Department of Commerce and are meant to serve as a way to bridge the gap between privacy regulations of the European Union and the United States. Due to the lack of adequate privacy laws and protection on the federal level in the US, European privacy regulations generally prohibit the exporting of PII from Europe to the United States. Participation in the Safe Harbor program is voluntary on the part of US organizations. These organizations must conform to specific requirements and policies that mirror those from the EU, thus possibly fulfilling the EU requirements for data sharing and export. This way, American businesses can be allowed to serve customers in the EU. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) pertains to the protection of patient medical records and privacy.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) focuses on the use of PII within financial institutions. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) regulates the financial and accounting practices used by organizations in order to protect shareholders from improper practices and errors.

Explanation
With SDN, the filtering and forwarding capabilities and administration are separated. This allows the cloud provider to build interfaces and management tools for administrative delegation of filtering configuration, without having to allow direct access to underlying network equipment. Firewalling and protocols are both terms related to networks, but they are not components SDN is concerned with.

When operating within a global framework, a security professional runs into a multitude of jurisdictions and requirements, which often may not be clearly applicable or may be in contention with each other. These requirements can involve the location of the users and the type of data they enter into systems, the laws governing the organization that owns the application and any regulatory requirements they may have, and finally the appropriate laws and regulations for the jurisdiction housing the IT resources and where the data is actually stored, which may be multiple jurisdictions as well. Different certifications would not come into play as a challenge because the major IT and data center certifications are international and would apply to any cloud provider.
Different capabilities and different operational procedures would be mitigated by the organization's selection of a cloud provider and would not be a challenge if an appropriate provider was chosen, regardless of location.