AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 853

A company is migrating its workloads to AWS. The company has sensitive and critical data in on-premises relational databases that run on SQL Server instances.

The company wants to use the AWS Cloud to increase security and reduce operational overhead for the databases.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Migrate the databases to Amazon EC2 instances. Use an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) AWS managed key for encryption.
• B. Migrate the databases to a Multi-AZ Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance. Use an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) AWS managed key for encryption.
• C. Migrate the data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use Amazon Macie to ensure data security.
• D. Migrate the databases to an Amazon DynamoDB table. Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to ensure data security.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Migrating to Amazon RDS for SQL Server significantly reduces operational overhead by offloading patching, backups, and infrastructure scaling to AWS, while the Multi-AZ deployment ensures high availability. Using an AWS KMS AWS managed key satisfies the security requirement by encrypting the data at rest. Amazon EC2 would not minimize operational overhead as it requires self-management, while Amazon S3 is object storage and Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database, making them unsuitable for directly hosting SQL Server relational databases.