SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company has a production AWS account and a development AWS account under AWS Organizations. The development team wants to deploy a CloudFormation stack that creates an S3 bucket with a bucket policy that grants access to the production account's IAM roles. The development account has an SCP that denies all s3:PutBucketPolicy actions. The development team has full administrator access in their account. When they try to create the stack, it fails. What is the most likely reason and how should they proceed?
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
✓
The SCP denies s3:PutBucketPolicy and overrides the administrator permissions. They need to request an exception to the SCP from the security team.
SCPs apply to all principals in the account, including administrators, and deny actions even if IAM policies allow them. Since the SCP denies s3:PutBucketPolicy, the development team cannot create the bucket policy despite having full admin access. Option A is incorrect because the team does have IAM permissions (admin), but the SCP overrides them. Option C is incorrect because CloudFormation's service role is not the issue; the SCP restriction affects all principals, including CloudFormation. Option D is incorrect because the trust policy of the production account's IAM roles is unrelated to the SCP in the development account.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The development team does not have IAM permissions to create buckets. They need to attach an IAM policy that allows s3:PutBucketPolicy.
Why it's wrong here
They have admin access.
- ✓
The SCP denies s3:PutBucketPolicy and overrides the administrator permissions. They need to request an exception to the SCP from the security team.
Why this is correct
SCPs can deny actions even to administrators.
- ✗
CloudFormation service role is missing. They need to create a service role with appropriate permissions.
Why it's wrong here
Service role would also be subject to SCP.
- ✗
The production account's IAM roles are not trusted. They need to update the trust policy.
Why it's wrong here
The failure is due to SCP denial.
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
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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.