AWS Certified Security – Specialty — Question 468

A company uses AWS Organizations to manage a small number of AWS accounts. However, the company plans to add 1,000 more accounts soon. The company allows only a centralized security team to create IAM roles for all AWS accounts and teams. Application teams submit requests for IAM roles to the security team. The security team has a backlog of IAM role requests and cannot review and provision the IAM roles quickly.

The security team must create a process that will allow application teams to provision their own IAM roles. The process must also limit the scope of IAM roles and prevent privilege escalation.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Create an IAM group for each application team. Associate policies with each IAM group. Provision IAM users for each application team member. Add the new IAM users to the appropriate IAM group by using role-based access control (RBAC).
• B. Delegate application team leads to provision IAM roles for each team. Conduct a quarterly review of the IAM roles the team leads have provisioned. Ensure that the application team leads have the appropriate training to review IAM roles.
• C. Put each AWS account in its own OU. Add an SCP to each OU to grant access to only the AWS services that the teams plan to use. Include conditions in the AWS account of each team.
• D. Create an SCP and a permissions boundary for IAM roles. Add the SCP to the root OU so that only roles that have the permissions boundary attached can create any new IAM roles.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Option D is the most efficient and scalable solution because using an SCP combined with an IAM permissions boundary enforces programmatic guardrails at scale. The SCP ensures that users can only create new IAM roles if they attach a specific permissions boundary, which effectively prevents privilege escalation. Other options, such as manual reviews, individual OUs, or managing legacy IAM users across 1,000 accounts, introduce massive operational overhead and fail to provide automated prevention.