SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company is using AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. The company has a production account and a development account. The security team needs to ensure that developers cannot create IAM users in the development account. Which option is the MOST effective?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse IAM policies (which are account-specific and can be overridden) with SCPs (which are organization-wide and cannot be bypassed by account administrators), leading them to choose an IAM-based solution that is less effective for cross-account control.
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 an SCP to the development account that denies iam:CreateUser.
Service Control Policies (SCPs) are the most effective way to enforce permissions boundaries across entire accounts in AWS Organizations. An SCP applied to the development account will deny the `iam:CreateUser` action for all principals (including the root user) in that account, regardless of any IAM policies attached to users or roles. This ensures developers cannot create IAM users, even if they have full administrative access within the 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.
- ✓
Apply an SCP to the development account that denies iam:CreateUser.
Why this is correct
SCPs are effective even for users with full administrative permissions.
- ✗
Create an IAM group for developers with a policy that denies iam:CreateUser.
Why it's wrong here
Same issue as A; developers might be able to leave the group.
- ✗
Enable AWS CloudTrail to monitor iam:CreateUser calls.
Why it's wrong here
Monitoring does not prevent the action.
- ✗
Attach an IAM policy to each developer user that denies iam:CreateUser.
Why it's wrong here
If developers have permissions to change their own policies, they could remove this deny.
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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.