SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company has multiple AWS accounts managed via AWS Organizations. The security team needs to enforce that all S3 buckets across all accounts have server-side encryption with AWS KMS (SSE-KMS) enabled, and any new bucket that does not comply must be automatically remediated. Which design should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse SCPs as a tool for retroactive remediation, when in fact SCPs only deny or allow API actions at the time of the request and cannot modify existing resources, making AWS Config with automatic remediation necessary for fixing non-compliant buckets.
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 a Service Control Policy (SCP) to deny PutBucketEncryption actions that do not set SSE-KMS, and use AWS Config with a custom rule and automatic remediation via Lambda to fix existing buckets.
It combines a Service Control Policy (SCP) to proactively deny any PutBucketEncryption action that does not specify SSE-KMS, preventing non-compliant buckets from being created, and AWS Config with a custom rule and automatic remediation via Lambda to detect and fix existing non-compliant buckets. This dual approach ensures both prevention and remediation across all accounts in the AWS Organization, meeting the security team's enforcement requirement.
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 Resource Access Manager (RAM) to share a KMS key across accounts, and enable default encryption in each account's S3 settings.
Why it's wrong here
RAM shares resources but does not enforce encryption policies across accounts.
- ✓
Use a Service Control Policy (SCP) to deny PutBucketEncryption actions that do not set SSE-KMS, and use AWS Config with a custom rule and automatic remediation via Lambda to fix existing buckets.
Why this is correct
This combines prevention with SCP and remediation with Config auto-remediation.
- ✗
Use AWS Config to detect non-compliant buckets and a Service Control Policy (SCP) to enforce encryption on existing buckets.
Why it's wrong here
SCPs cannot remediate existing resources; they only deny future actions.
- ✗
Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor bucket creation, and trigger a Lambda function to enable SSE-KMS on new buckets.
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail logs events but does not automatically remediate; also this does not address existing buckets.
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.