AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 390

A company wants to reduce its Amazon S3 storage costs in its production environment without impacting durability or performance of the stored objects.
What is the FIRST step the company should take to meet these objectives?

Answer options

• A. Enable Amazon Macie on the business-critical S3 buckets to classify the sensitivity of the objects.
• B. Enable S3 analytics to identify S3 buckets that are candidates for transitioning to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA).
• C. Enable versioning on all business-critical S3 buckets.
• D. Migrate the objects in all S3 buckets to S3 Intelligent-Tiering.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Enabling S3 analytics allows the organization to observe and analyze data access patterns, helping them identify which buckets can be safely transitioned to S3 Standard-IA to save costs without sacrificing performance or durability. Amazon Macie is a security and data privacy service, and enabling versioning actually increases storage costs by retaining multiple versions of objects. Immediately migrating all objects to S3 Intelligent-Tiering without analysis could lead to unnecessary transition and monitoring fees.