SAP-C02 - Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity - Section 1.3

Design an automated, cross-account and cross-Region backup and restoration strategy using AWS Backup with policy-driven retention and recovery testing.

Design an automated backup strategy using AWS Backup with centralised backup plans, backup vault lock, and cross-Region copy rules to enforce retention and meet compliance requirements. Apply point-in-time recovery for supported services and verify restores regularly to validate recoverability.

AWS BackupBackup vaultCross-Region copyPoint-in-time recovery

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleDesign Solutions for Organizational Complexitymedium

A financial services firm centralises backups for several production accounts into a single AWS Backup vault in eu-west-1. A security review demands that recovery points survive a full Region outage and that nobody, including an administrator with compromised credentials, can delete or shorten the retention of a backup before its retention period expires. Which configuration BEST satisfies both the Region-loss and immutability requirements?

  • ACopy recovery points to a second backup vault in the same eu-west-1 Region and attach a restrictive vault access policy that denies delete actions to every principal except the backup administrators.
  • BSchedule cross-Region snapshot copies of the underlying EBS and RDS resources to eu-west-2 and rely on an IAM permission boundary on the administrator role to block any delete API calls on those snapshots.
  • CCopy recovery points to a backup vault in eu-west-2 and apply AWS Backup Vault Lock in compliance mode on the destination vault so the retention period is enforced and cannot be reduced or removed by anyone. Correct
  • DEnable AWS Backup Vault Lock in governance mode on the eu-west-1 vault and turn on continuous point-in-time recovery so the data is protected without copying recovery points to another Region.
Combine cross-Region vault copy with AWS Backup Vault Lock in compliance mode to achieve both Region-loss resilience and immutable retention. Cross-Region copy duplicates recovery points into a vault in another Region so a Region outage cannot destroy every copy. Vault Lock in compliance mode then makes the retention period write-once and tamper-proof, meaning even the root user cannot delete or shorten a backup until it expires. Same-Region copies, access policies and governance-mode locks each fail one of the two stated requirements.

Why A is wrong: A same-Region copy does not survive a Region outage, and a vault access policy can be edited or its exceptions abused, so it provides neither the geographic protection nor the true immutability required.

Why B is wrong: Plain cross-Region snapshots survive a Region loss but sit outside the vault, and a permission boundary can be detached or revised by another privileged principal, so the retention is not genuinely immutable.

Why C is correct: A cross-Region copy places recovery points beyond a single Region failure, and Vault Lock in compliance mode makes retention immutable so no principal, even root, can delete or shorten a backup before it expires.

Why D is wrong: Governance mode still lets sufficiently privileged users alter the lock, and keeping everything in eu-west-1 leaves the backups exposed to the very Region outage the review is concerned about.

See more SAP-C02 practice questions, answers explained.

More in this domain

Back to all Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity objectives, or the SAP-C02 cert hub.

Examworthy is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services. Original, blueprint-aligned practice material only.