SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company is using AWS Organizations with multiple accounts. The security team requires that all S3 buckets across all accounts must have server-side encryption enabled and block public access. Which TWO actions should be taken to enforce these requirements centrally?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse SCPs with IAM policies, thinking IAM policies in the management account can control member accounts, but SCPs are the only mechanism that can centrally deny actions across all accounts in an organization.
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
✓
Create an SCP to deny PutBucketAcl, PutBucketPolicy, and PutBucketPublicAccessBlock actions that do not meet the requirements.
Service Control Policies (SCPs) in AWS Organizations allow you to centrally deny API actions that do not meet security requirements across all member accounts. By denying PutBucketAcl, PutBucketPolicy, and PutBucketPublicAccessBlock actions that would disable encryption or public access blocks, you enforce compliance at the API level, preventing any non-compliant bucket creation or modification regardless of the account or IAM permissions.
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 Service Catalog to enforce S3 bucket encryption and public access settings.
Why it's wrong here
Service Catalog enforces product configurations only for provisioned products, not existing buckets.
- ✗
Define a tag policy that requires encryption and public access tags on all S3 buckets.
Why it's wrong here
Tag policies do not enforce security configurations.
- ✓
Create an SCP to deny PutBucketAcl, PutBucketPolicy, and PutBucketPublicAccessBlock actions that do not meet the requirements.
Why this is correct
SCPs can centrally deny actions across all accounts.
- ✗
Use IAM policies in the management account to restrict S3 permissions for all users.
Why it's wrong here
IAM policies are per-account and cannot centrally enforce requirements across all accounts.
- ✓
Enable AWS Config and create rules to detect and automatically remediate non-compliant S3 buckets.
Why this is correct
AWS Config rules can centrally monitor and remediate across accounts.
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.