SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company uses AWS Organizations and wants to implement a least-privilege model for IAM roles. The security team needs to ensure that no IAM role can be created without an approval workflow. Which THREE steps should the company take?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse auditing (CloudTrail) with enforcement, or assume that deployment automation (CloudFormation StackSets) inherently includes approval workflows, when in fact neither provides the required preventive 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
✓
Create an AWS Lambda function that is triggered by CloudTrail events to automatically tag approved roles.
An AWS Lambda function triggered by CloudTrail events can automatically tag newly created IAM roles with an 'Approved' tag as part of an approval workflow. This ensures that only roles that have gone through the approval process receive the required tag, enabling downstream enforcement via SCPs or AWS Config.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create an AWS Lambda function that is triggered by CloudTrail events to automatically tag approved roles.
Why this is correct
Automates tagging after approval.
- ✓
Use a service control policy (SCP) to deny iam:CreateRole unless a specific tag (e.g., 'Approved') is present.
Why this is correct
SCPs can enforce tag-based conditions.
- ✗
Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy IAM roles across accounts.
Why it's wrong here
Does not enforce approval.
- ✗
Enable AWS CloudTrail to log all IAM role creation events.
Why it's wrong here
Logging does not enforce approval.
- ✓
Use AWS Config rules to detect roles without the 'Approved' tag and mark them as non-compliant.
Why this is correct
Reactive enforcement and visibility.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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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.