PCSE Practice Question: Configuring Access Within a Cloud Solution Environment
A security engineer needs to allow a group of external auditors to view all resources in a project but not modify anything. They must also prevent the auditors from viewing sensitive data in BigQuery datasets. Which TWO IAM bindings should the engineer configure? (Choose two.)
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
✓
Grant roles/viewer on the project to the auditors group
To grant read-only access to resources (configurations) without data access, you can grant roles/viewer on the project. However, roles/viewer includes bigquery.tables.getData, which allows reading table data. To prevent that, you must also add a deny policy to block bigquery.tables.getData. Alternatively, you can use a custom role, but the question asks for IAM bindings.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Grant roles/viewer on the project to the auditors group
Why this is correct
This grants read access to all resource configurations, but includes BigQuery data access.
- ✗
Grant roles/bigquery.dataViewer on the project to the auditors group
Why it's wrong here
This would explicitly grant BigQuery data access, which is unwanted.
- ✓
Create a deny policy at the project level that denies bigquery.tables.getData for the auditors group
Why this is correct
This deny policy overrides the allow from roles/viewer, blocking data access.
- ✗
Grant roles/iam.securityReviewer on the project to the auditors group
Why it's wrong here
This role also includes data access permissions, similar to viewer.
- ✗
Remove the auditors group from all IAM bindings and grant them roles/browser only
Why it's wrong here
roles/browser provides even less access (can only browse resources), but they need to view all resources.
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JA
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.