Vendor documentation from the manufacturer of the physical hardware is the best source of best practices for securing the BIOS.

Data masking does not support authentication in any way. All the others are excellent use cases for data masking.

Explanation
Patents protect processes (as well as inventions, new plantlife, and decorative patterns). The other answers listed are answers to other questions.

Explanation
The CPU and memory resources of an environment together comprise its "computing" resources. Cloud environments, especially public clouds, are enormous pools of resources for computing and are typically divided among a large number of customers with constantly changing needs and demands. Although storage and networking are core components of a cloud environment, they do not comprise its computing core.
Software, much like within a traditional data center, is highly subjective based on the application, system, service, or cloud computing model used; however, it is not one of the core cloud components.