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PCSE Practice Question: A DevOps team wants to grant a contractor…
A DevOps team wants to grant a contractor temporary access to a specific Cloud Storage bucket for 30 days. The contractor has a Google account (example@gmail.com). The bucket contains sensitive data, and the access should be as restrictive as possible. What is the recommended way to grant this access?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between project-level and resource-level IAM policies, and the trap here is that candidates choose project-level IAM (Option B) thinking it's simpler, but they overlook that it grants access to all buckets in the project, violating the principle of least privilege.
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
✓
Add the contractor's email to the bucket-level IAM policy with the 'Storage Object Viewer' role.
Bucket-level IAM policies allow you to grant granular, time-bound access to a specific bucket without affecting other resources in the project. By adding the contractor's email (example@gmail.com) to the bucket-level IAM policy with the 'Storage Object Viewer' role, you restrict access to only that bucket and only to read objects, which is the most restrictive approach for a 30-day temporary access requirement.
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 a bucket ACL granting the contractor READ access.
Why it's wrong here
ACLs are legacy; IAM is preferred for Google Cloud.
- ✗
Add the contractor's email to the project-level IAM policy with the 'Storage Object Viewer' role.
Why it's wrong here
Project-level access grants access to all buckets in the project.
- ✓
Add the contractor's email to the bucket-level IAM policy with the 'Storage Object Viewer' role.
Why this is correct
Bucket-level IAM is granular and can be removed after 30 days.
- ✗
Generate a signed URL for the contractor to access the bucket objects.
Why it's wrong here
Signed URLs grant access without authentication and are not suitable for ongoing access.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCSE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud 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 PCSE exam.