AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 301

A company needs to store data in Amazon S3. A compliance requirement states that when any changes are made to objects the previous state of the object with any changes must be preserved. Additionally, files older than 5 years should not be accessed but need to be archived for auditing.
What should a solutions architect recommend that is MOST cost-effective?

Answer options

• A. Enable object-level versioning and S3 Object Lock in governance mode
• B. Enable object-level versioning and S3 Object Lock in compliance mode
• C. Enable object-level versioning. Enable a lifecycle policy to move data older than 5 years to S3 Glacier Deep Archive
• D. Enable object-level versioning. Enable a lifecycle policy to move data older than 5 years to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Enabling S3 versioning ensures that previous versions of objects are retained whenever updates are made. To meet the archival requirement cost-effectively, a lifecycle policy should transition objects older than 5 years to S3 Glacier Deep Archive, which offers the lowest storage cost. S3 Standard-IA is more expensive than Glacier Deep Archive for long-term archiving, and S3 Object Lock is unnecessary since the requirement only asks to preserve history, not prevent deletion.