SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company is implementing AWS Control Tower to manage a multi-account environment. The security team needs to ensure that all accounts in the organization follow the principle of least privilege for IAM roles. Which TWO actions should the team take?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse detective controls (like CloudTrail alerts) with preventive controls (like SCPs), assuming monitoring alone is sufficient to enforce least privilege, but the question explicitly asks for actions that 'ensure' compliance, which requires proactive denial, not just detection.
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
✓
Apply service control policies (SCPs) to deny the creation of IAM roles with overly broad permissions, such as 'Action: *' and 'Resource: *'.
Service Control Policies (SCPs) in AWS Organizations allow you to centrally control the maximum available permissions for all accounts within an organizational unit (OU). By applying an SCP that denies the creation of IAM roles with 'Action: *' and 'Resource: *', the security team enforces the principle of least privilege at the organization level, preventing any account from creating overly permissive roles regardless of the account's own IAM policies.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Apply service control policies (SCPs) to deny the creation of IAM roles with overly broad permissions, such as 'Action: *' and 'Resource: *'.
Why this is correct
SCPs enforce preventive controls at the organization level.
- ✗
Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor IAM role creation and alert when roles with broad permissions are created.
Why it's wrong here
This is detective, not preventive.
- ✓
Enable IAM Access Analyzer to review and identify IAM roles that grant permissions to external principals or have unused permissions.
Why this is correct
Access Analyzer helps identify overly permissive roles.
- ✗
Use AWS IAM Roles Anywhere to manage temporary credentials for workloads outside AWS.
Why it's wrong here
This is for external workloads, not least privilege.
- ✗
Enable AWS Resource Access Manager to share resources only with trusted accounts.
Why it's wrong here
RAM is for resource sharing, not IAM roles.
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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.