AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 825

A company is running a highly sensitive application on Amazon EC2 backed by an Amazon RDS database. Compliance regulations mandate that all personally identifiable information (PII) be encrypted at rest.

Which solution should a solutions architect recommend to meet this requirement with the LEAST amount of changes to the infrastructure?

Answer options

• A. Deploy AWS Certificate Manager to generate certificates. Use the certificates to encrypt the database volume.
• B. Deploy AWS CloudHSM, generate encryption keys, and use the keys to encrypt database volumes.
• C. Configure SSL encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys to encrypt database volumes.
• D. Configure Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) encryption and Amazon RDS encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys to encrypt instance and database volumes.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Enabling native Amazon EBS encryption and Amazon RDS encryption with AWS KMS keys is the most straightforward way to encrypt data at rest with minimal configuration changes. AWS Certificate Manager and SSL are designed to secure data in transit rather than data at rest. While AWS CloudHSM can manage cryptographic keys, it requires significant administrative overhead and architectural changes compared to using AWS KMS.