SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new data lake on Amazon S3 using AWS Glue for ETL. The data is partitioned by date and sensitive columns must be masked for non-privileged users. The solution must minimize storage costs and allow different masking policies per user. Which approach should the architect recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse S3 bucket policies or Glue ETL jobs with the ability to perform dynamic, per-user column masking at query time, when in fact only Lake Formation provides this capability without data duplication or batch processing.
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 Lake Formation to define column-level permissions and masking policies.
AWS Lake Formation provides native column-level security and dynamic masking policies that can be applied per user or role without duplicating data. This approach minimizes storage costs because the data remains in a single location, and masking is applied at query time based on the requesting principal's permissions, satisfying the requirement for different masking policies per user.
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 Lake Formation to define column-level permissions and masking policies.
Why this is correct
AWS Lake Formation enforces column-level security and data filters directly on the AWS Glue Data Catalog, so non-privileged users querying through Athena or Redshift Spectrum receive masked values while privileged users see raw data. This satisfies the per-user masking requirement without duplicating masked copies in Amazon S3, keeping storage costs minimal.
- ✗
Create separate S3 buckets for each masking policy and copy data accordingly.
Why it's wrong here
Duplicating data into per-policy buckets multiplies storage, contradicting the minimise-storage-cost requirement, and copies must be refreshed as policies change. Separate buckets suit strict isolation between tenants or environments, not per-user masking of one shared dataset.
- ✗
Use AWS Glue ETL jobs to mask data based on user role at query time.
Why it's wrong here
Glue ETL jobs transform data during processing, not at query time, so they cannot apply per-user masking dynamically; each role would need its own materialised copy. Role-based ETL masking suits static, pre-computed redaction where all consumers share one policy.
- ✗
Store masked data in separate prefixes in the same bucket and use S3 bucket policies.
Why it's wrong here
Separate prefixes duplicate the masked data, raising storage cost, and S3 bucket policies control access to objects, not column-level masking. Prefix separation suits coarse access tiers, such as restricting a department to its own folder, rather than varying masked columns per user.
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
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every SAP-C02 question from scratch — 984 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.