Question 230 - SCS-C02 discussion

To preserve the data for 7 years and prevent anyone from changing or deleting it, the security officer needs to use a service that can store the data securely and enforce compliance controls. The most cost-effective way to do this is to use Amazon S3 Glacier, which is a low-cost storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. S3 Glacier allows you to create a vault, which is a container for storing archives. Archives are any data such as photos, videos, or documents that you want to store durably and reliably.

S3 Glacier also offers a feature called Vault Lock, which helps you to easily deploy and enforce compliance controls for individual vaults with a Vault Lock policy. You can specify controls such as ''write once read many'' (WORM) in a Vault Lock policy and lock the policy from future edits. Once a Vault Lock policy is locked, the policy can no longer be changed or deleted. S3 Glacier enforces the controls set in the Vault Lock policy to help achieve your compliance objectives. For example, you can use Vault Lock policies to enforce data retention by denying deletes for a specified period of time.

To use S3 Glacier and Vault Lock, the security officer needs to follow these steps:

Create a vault in S3 Glacier using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs.

Create a Vault Lock policy in S3 Glacier that meets all the regulatory requirements using the IAM policy language. The policy can include conditions such as aws:CurrentTime or aws:SecureTransport to further restrict access to the vault.

Initiate the lock by attaching the Vault Lock policy to the vault, which sets the lock to an in-progress state and returns a lock ID. While the policy is in the in-progress state, you have 24 hours to validate your Vault Lock policy before the lock ID expires. To prevent your vault from exiting the in-progress state, you must complete the Vault Lock process within these 24 hours. Otherwise, your Vault Lock policy will be deleted.

Use the lock ID to complete the lock process. If the Vault Lock policy doesn't work as expected, you can stop the Vault Lock process and restart from the beginning.

Upload the data to the vault using either direct upload or multipart upload methods.

For more information about S3 Glacier and Vault Lock, see S3 Glacier Vault Lock.

The other options are incorrect because:

Option A is incorrect because creating an Amazon S3 bucket and configuring it to use S3 Object Lock in compliance mode will not prevent anyone from changing or deleting the data. S3 Object Lock is a feature that allows you to store objects using a WORM model in S3. You can apply two types of object locks: retention periods and legal holds. A retention period specifies a fixed period of time during which an object remains locked. A legal hold is an indefinite lock on an object until it is removed. However, S3 Object Lock only prevents objects from being overwritten or deleted by any user, including the root user in your AWS account. It does not prevent objects from being modified by other means, such as changing their metadata or encryption settings. Moreover, S3 Object Lock requires that you enable versioning on your bucket, which will incur additional storage costs for storing multiple versions of an object.

Option B is incorrect because creating an Amazon S3 bucket and configuring it to use S3 Object Lock in governance mode will not prevent anyone from changing or deleting the data. S3 Object Lock in governance mode works similarly to compliance mode, except that users with specific IAM permissions can change or delete objects that are locked. This means that users who have s3:BypassGovernanceRetention permission can remove retention periods or legal holds from objects and overwrite or delete them before they expire. This option does not provide strong enforcement for compliance controls as required by the regulatory requirements.

Option D is incorrect because creating an Amazon S3 bucket and using a lifecycle rule to transition the data to a vault in S3 Glacier will not prevent anyone from changing or deleting the data. Lifecycle rules are actions that Amazon S3 automatically performs on objects during their lifetime. You can use lifecycle rules to transition objects between storage classes or expire them after a certain period of time. However, lifecycle rules do not apply any compliance controls on objects or prevent them from being modified or deleted by users. Moreover, transitioning objects from S3 to S3 Glacier using lifecycle rules will incur additional charges for retrieval requests and data transfers.