SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A large enterprise has 200 AWS accounts organized under AWS Organizations. The central security team needs to audit all IAM role trust policies across accounts to ensure no cross-account roles allow external principals. Which approach is most efficient and scalable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse IAM Access Analyzer's scope (resource-based policies) with IAM role trust policies, or they assume a custom script is more flexible when AWS Config provides a native, scalable solution for cross-account resource auditing.
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
✓
Enable AWS Config aggregator and use advanced queries to search for trust policies.
AWS Config aggregator with advanced queries allows you to query the resource configuration of IAM roles across all accounts in AWS Organizations from a single management account. This approach is serverless, scalable, and provides a centralized view without needing to script cross-account access or manage multiple findings. The query can filter on the 'assumeRolePolicyDocument' field to detect trust policies that allow external principals (e.g., 'Effect: Allow' with 'AWS': '*' or a non-account ARN).
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Enable AWS Config aggregator and use advanced queries to search for trust policies.
Why this is correct
Config aggregator allows querying across all accounts.
- ✗
Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check for overly permissive roles.
Why it's wrong here
Trusted Advisor checks only limited best practices.
- ✗
Write a script using AWS SDK to list roles in each account and analyze trust policies.
Why it's wrong here
Script requires cross-account access and is complex to manage.
- ✗
Use IAM Access Analyzer to generate findings for each account.
Why it's wrong here
Access Analyzer provides findings but not a comprehensive audit of all trust policies.
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.