AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 678

A doctor's office is moving all of its patient data to the AWS Cloud. The office needs to retain all the data indefinitely, but the data is rarely accessed after a year.
The data must be immediately available during the first year. However, to minimize cost, the office is willing to wait a day for data that is more than 1 year old to become available.
Which combination of actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon S3 Lifecycle transition rule to move the data to S3 Glacier after a year.
• B. Create an Amazon S3 Lifecycle transition rule to move the data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after a year.
• C. Create an Amazon S3 bucket for the data. Store data in the S3 bucket by using the S3 Glacier storage class.
• D. Create an Amazon S3 bucket for the data. Store data in the bucket by using the S3 Standard storage class.
• E. Create an Amazon S3 bucket for the data. Store data in the bucket by using the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.

Correct answer: B, D

Explanation

Storing the initial data in S3 Standard ensures that patient records are immediately available during the first year of storage. Transitioning the data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after one year offers the lowest-cost storage tier for long-term retention, perfectly matching the clinic's willingness to wait up to 24 hours (standard retrieval for Deep Archive is within 12 hours) for older data. Other options like S3 Glacier are more expensive than Deep Archive, and storing data directly in Glacier or Intelligent-Tiering does not meet the immediate access and cost-optimization requirements as effectively.