Block storage provides the greatest performance advantage for traditional relational databases due to its high performance and low-latency characteristics. Block storage allows databases to rapidly manage data in fixed-sized blocks, which is ideal for databases that require frequent read/write operations.

Right-sizing is the process of allocating the correct amount of resources to a VM. In this case, the VMs that are constantly ballooning are being allocated too much memory. Right-sizing these VMs will reduce the amount of memory that they are allocated, which will prevent them from ballooning.

An off-site cloud backup solution that offers full, incremental, and differential backups would best meet the requirements of being cost-effective, allowing granular recovery, and supporting multi- location storage. This combination allows for comprehensive backup strategies that can be tailored to the company's needs while optimizing storage costs.

For detailed logging to support root cause analysis of past events, the team should implement log retention to ensure logs are kept for the necessary amount of time and log aggregation to compile logs from various sources for easier analysis and correlation.

Using cloud policies enforces organizational standards and prevents unauthorized or noncompliant configuration changes. Policies help ensure resources remain configured according to approved requirements.
Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows cloud resources to be defined, deployed, and managed consistently through version-controlled code. This reduces configuration drift and prevents manual changes from causing inconsistencies in the environment.