AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 421

An international company has established a new business entity in South Korea. The company also has established a new AWS account to contain the workload for the South Korean region. The company has set up the workload in the new account in the ap-northeast-2 Region. The workload consists of three Auto Scaling groups of Amazon EC2 instances. All workloads that operate in this Region must keep system logs and application logs for 7 years.

A security engineer must implement a solution to ensure that no logging data is lost for each instance during scaling activities. The solution also must keep the logs for only the required period of 7 years.

Which combination of steps should the security engineer take to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

Answer options

• A. Ensure that the Amazon CloudWatch agent is installed on all the EC2 instances that the Auto Scaling groups launch. Generate a CloudWatch agent configuration file to forward the required logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
• B. Set the log retention for desired log groups to 7 years.
• C. Attach an IAM role to the launch configuration or launch template that the Auto Scaling groups use. Configure the role to provide the necessary permissions to forward logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
• D. Attach an IAM role to the launch configuration or launch template that the Auto Scaling groups use. Configure the role to provide the necessary permissions to forward logs to Amazon S3.
• E. Ensure that a log forwarding application is installed on all the EC2 instances that the Auto Scaling groups launch. Configure the log forwarding application to periodically bundle the logs and forward the logs to Amazon S3.
• F. Configure an Amazon S3 Lifecycle policy on the target S3 bucket to expire objects after 7 years.

Correct answer: A, B, C

Explanation

Streaming logs in real-time to Amazon CloudWatch Logs using the CloudWatch agent (A) and an IAM role (C) ensures that logs are safely stored off-instance immediately, preventing data loss when Auto Scaling terminates instances. Periodic bundling of logs to S3 (E) is susceptible to data loss for logs generated between export intervals during scale-in events. CloudWatch Logs natively supports setting a retention period of 7 years (B) directly on the log groups, making S3 lifecycle policies unnecessary for this specific requirement.