SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A large financial services company uses AWS Organizations with over 200 accounts. The security team has implemented a Service Control Policy (SCP) that denies access to all services except a whitelist that includes Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon CloudWatch. Recently, the DevOps team reported that they cannot create new EC2 instances in their development account, even though the administrator explicitly attached an IAM policy allowing ec2:RunInstances. The SCP does not explicitly deny EC2. What is the most likely cause of this issue?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to think an explicit IAM allow can override an SCP, but SCPs set the maximum permissions boundary, so any action not explicitly allowed by the SCP is implicitly denied.
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
✓
The SCP denies all services not explicitly allowed, and EC2 is not on the whitelist
The SCP uses a deny-all approach with a whitelist of allowed services. Since EC2 is not on that whitelist, the SCP implicitly denies all EC2 actions, overriding any IAM policy that explicitly allows ec2:RunInstances. SCPs act as a guardrail that cannot be bypassed by account-level 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.
- ✗
The IAM role used by the DevOps team has a trust policy that does not allow EC2 actions
Why it's wrong here
The trust policy determines who can assume the role, not what actions are allowed.
- ✗
The EC2 service has been disabled via AWS Config in that account
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is a compliance service, not a permission enforcement service.
- ✗
The development account is in an organizational unit (OU) with a different SCP that denies EC2
Why it's wrong here
The scenario states the SCP does not explicitly deny EC2.
- ✓
The SCP denies all services not explicitly allowed, and EC2 is not on the whitelist
Why this is correct
SCPs that use an allow list deny all services not explicitly listed.
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.