DEA-C01 Data Store Management Practice Question

A company is designing a data lake on Amazon S3 for analytics. The data includes sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). Which TWO actions should the company take to protect the data? (Choose TWO.)

⚠ Common exam trap

Many exam-takers confuse operational features like Requester Pays or Transfer Acceleration with security controls, or they think replication alone provides data protection, when in fact encryption and access blocking are the direct mechanisms for safeguarding PII.

Answer choices

Why each option matters

Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.

Correct answer & explanation

✓

Enable S3 Block Public Access.

S3 Block Public Access (Option A) prevents any public access to S3 buckets and objects, which is critical for protecting PII from unintended exposure. Default encryption with SSE-KMS (Option E) ensures that all data written to S3 is encrypted at rest using AWS KMS-managed keys, providing both encryption and centralized key management for sensitive data.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

✓
Enable S3 Block Public Access.
Why this is correct
S3 Block Public Access overrides bucket policies and ACLs that would otherwise expose objects publicly, preventing accidental PII leakage. This satisfies the protection requirement by enforcing account- and bucket-level guardrails against public exposure of the data lake.
✗
Enable Requester Pays.
Why it's wrong here
Requester Pays shifts access charges to the caller; it grants no encryption, access control or masking of PII. It suits public datasets where the owner wants consumers to bear request and transfer costs, not regulated data requiring protection.
✗
Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration.
Why it's wrong here
Transfer Acceleration speeds uploads over AWS edge locations using CloudFront; it provides no encryption, access control or masking, so PII remains readable in the bucket. Protecting PII requires SSE-KMS encryption, bucket policies, IAM least privilege and Macie discovery. Acceleration would be correct when latency for geographically distant uploads is the actual problem.
✗
Enable cross-region replication.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-region replication copies objects to another region for durability or latency; it duplicates PII into additional locations without encrypting or restricting it. It is selected for disaster recovery or locality requirements, not to safeguard sensitive data.
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Enable default encryption with SSE-KMS.
Why this is correct
SSE-KMS encrypts objects at rest using AWS KMS-managed keys, protecting PII against unauthorised access to underlying storage. This satisfies the requirement to safeguard sensitive data in the S3 data lake, with key policies and audit trails governing cryptographic access.

Quick reference

AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison

Storage Class	Min Duration	Retrieval	Use Case
S3 Standard	None	Immediate	Frequently accessed data
S3 Standard-IA	30 days	Immediate	Infrequent access, rapid retrieval
S3 One Zone-IA	30 days	Immediate	Non-critical infrequent data
S3 Intelligent-Tiering	None	Immediate–hours	Unknown or changing access patterns
S3 Glacier Instant	90 days	Milliseconds	Archive with instant retrieval
S3 Glacier Flexible	90 days	Minutes–hours	Archive, flexible retrieval
S3 Glacier Deep Archive	180 days	Hours	Long-term compliance archive

Go deeper

DEA-C01 Data Store Management Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison

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