Which practice can help mitigate the risk of DDoS attacks in a cloud environment?

Implementing monitoring tools is essential for mitigating the risk of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in a cloud environment. These tools enable organizations to gain visibility into their network traffic patterns and identify unusual spikes or anomalies that may indicate an ongoing or imminent DDoS attack. By actively monitoring traffic, organizations can quickly react to suspicious activity, allowing them to deploy countermeasures, such as rate limiting or traffic filtering, before the attack can disrupt services.

Additionally, monitoring tools can help in the early detection of attack vectors, enabling proactive defense strategies and improving the overall resilience of cloud services. Such capabilities are critical in a cloud environment where scalability and availability are paramount, ensuring that services can withstand high volumes of traffic, both legitimate and malicious.

The other options, while they might have a role in different scenarios, do not effectively address the specific challenges presented by DDoS attacks. Reducing the number of users, limiting internet access, or shutting down services during an attack would not only negatively impact legitimate users but could also fail to prevent attackers from overwhelming the system. Therefore, using monitoring tools is the most effective and strategic response to DDoS threats in cloud environments.