A Platform Administrator for Cloud Kicks needs to ensure that only the financial records belonging...

The foundation of Salesforce data security is the Organization-Wide Default (OWD). To ensure that users can only see their own records (and those above them in the hierarchy), the administrator must set the OWD for the object to Private. When an object is private, a user can only see records they own. When that user runs a report, the report engine automatically respects these sharing settings and only displays the records the user is authorized to see. This is a much more secure and scalable solution than creating separate reports for every user (Option C). Option A (Public Read/Write) would allow everyone to see everything, violating the privacy requirement. Option D (Apex sharing) is a complex coding solution that is unnecessary when the standard "Private" sharing model fulfills the requirement through simple configuration.