DEA-C01 Question 236
Single answerA financial services company is required to delete customer data from their AWS storage systems to comply with regulatory requirements such as GDPR and business retention policies. The data is stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Which approach ensures that the data is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered?
- A
Use the Amazon S3 Lifecycle policy to transition the data to the Glacier storage class and then delete it.
- B
Enable versioning on the S3 bucket and delete the objects manually.
- C
Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to permanently delete objects after their retention period.
- D
Use the S3 DeleteObject API to delete the objects and then disable versioning.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
To ensure compliance with business and legal requirements regarding data deletion, the most reliable approach is to configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to permanently delete objects after their retention period. This method automates the deletion process, ensuring that all objects (including versioned ones, if applicable) are removed irreversibly. Manual deletion or transitioning to lower-cost storage classes does not guarantee compliance as the data may still exist in some form.
- A. Incorrect.
Transitioning data to Glacier does not meet the requirement of permanently deleting the data, as it just moves the data to a lower-cost storage tier and retains the data.
- B. Incorrect.
Enabling versioning and manually deleting objects only deletes the latest version of the object. Previous versions will still exist and can be recovered unless explicitly deleted.
- C. Correct.
Configuring an S3 Lifecycle policy to permanently delete objects ensures compliance with retention and legal requirements by automatically and irreversibly deleting objects after their retention period.
- D. Incorrect.
Using the S3 DeleteObject API to delete objects does not account for versioned objects already stored. Disabling versioning also does not delete existing versions of the objects.