SCS-C03 Security Foundations and Governance Practice Question
A company wants to implement a governance strategy that prevents any member account in the organization from disabling CloudTrail or deleting the organization-level trail. What is the most effective way to implement this while allowing account administrators to manage their own local resources?
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
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Enable an organization trail in the management account and apply an SCP to deny CloudTrail modification in member accounts.
To maintain governance in a multi-account environment, organizational trails should be used. By creating the trail at the organization level, it is automatically deployed to all accounts. Combining this with a Service Control Policy (SCP) that denies 'cloudtrail:StopLogging' and 'cloudtrail:DeleteTrail' ensures that member accounts cannot tamper with the audit logs, providing immutable governance across the enterprise.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Create an IAM role in each member account that only the security team can assume to manage CloudTrail.
Why it's wrong here
While cross-account roles are useful for management, they do not prevent a local administrator with full privileges from modifying or deleting the CloudTrail configuration. This approach relies on trust rather than technical guardrails and fails to provide the high level of governance required to ensure audit log integrity.
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Enable AWS Config in all accounts and create a custom rule to restart CloudTrail if it is stopped.
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config provides detective and corrective controls but is not a preventive measure. A user could still stop the trail or delete it, and there would be a gap in logging before the Config rule detects and remediates the change. Governance best practices prefer prevention over remediation for critical audit trails.
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Enable an organization trail in the management account and apply an SCP to deny CloudTrail modification in member accounts.
Why this is correct
Creating a trail at the organization level ensures uniform logging across all accounts. The SCP provides the necessary guardrail by explicitly denying destructive actions on CloudTrail resources for all principals in member accounts. This ensures that the audit trail remains active and protected from unauthorized changes throughout the organization.
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Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy a local trail in each account with a strict resource-based policy.
Why it's wrong here
StackSets can deploy resources consistently, but local trails in member accounts can still be modified by users with administrative permissions within those accounts. Resource-based policies for CloudTrail do not support denying actions to the account owner or administrators effectively, making this approach less secure than using an organizational SCP.
About these practice questions
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
This SCS-C03 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 SCS-C03 exam.