How Do You Know that “Delete” Means Delete in Cloud Storage?

With the ability to capture the state of a data set at any given point in time, while only consuming small amounts of resources, snapshots have become a fundamental technology component in many storage solutions. Through the use of snapshots and replication, cloud storage providers can offer a near-limitless capacity of storage, even to users with small bandwidth connections. These architectures rely on incremental snapshots to store and reproduce customer data sets on demand; but what about deleting data? How do you know these snapshots are truly destroyed and can be sure that “delete” means delete in cloud storage?