SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company has a multi-account strategy with a dedicated audit account. The audit account needs to have read-only access to all resources in all other accounts. The security team wants to use IAM roles. What is the MOST scalable way to set up this cross-account access?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose manual role creation (Option C) because it seems straightforward, but they overlook the scalability and automation benefits of StackSets, which is the most efficient solution for managing cross-account roles across many accounts in a multi-account strategy.
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
✓
Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy a stack containing an IAM role with the required trust and permissions.
AWS CloudFormation StackSets allows you to deploy a consistent IAM role with a read-only policy and a trust policy that grants the audit account access across all target accounts in a single, automated, and scalable operation. This approach eliminates manual effort, ensures consistency, and scales to hundreds of accounts without requiring per-account configuration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) to grant the audit team access to each account.
Why it's wrong here
AWS IAM Identity Center (SSO) grants human users console or CLI access to accounts; it does not give the audit account's principals programmatic read-only access to resources via an assumed IAM role. It is tempting for centralising workforce access, and would be correct for federating employee sign-in across accounts.
- ✗
Create an IAM user in the audit account and allow that user to assume a role in each account.
Why it's wrong here
An IAM user is a long-lived identity whose credentials must be rotated and shared, so it cannot scale across many accounts and adds a static secret. IAM roles with a trust policy are the intended mechanism for cross-account access; a user is only sensible for a single human login needing console access.
- ✗
Manually create an IAM role in each account and attach a read-only policy.
Why it's wrong here
Manually creating a role in every account does not scale and breaks as accounts are added; the audit account's principals still need a trust relationship and a mechanism to assume each role. It is tempting for its simplicity in small estates, and would be correct for a handful of accounts with static requirements.
- ✓
Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy a stack containing an IAM role with the required trust and permissions.
Why this is correct
CloudFormation StackSets deploy the IAM role with its trust policy and read-only permissions to every account simultaneously, satisfying the scalable cross-account access requirement. The audit account assumes the role in each target account, avoiding per-account manual role creation.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAP-C02 exam.