What SCS-C03 Questions and Answers feature?

AWS Config provides managed rules that continuously evaluate resource configurations against compliance requirements. The AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation highlights AWS Config managed rules as the preferred mechanism for enforcing configuration compliance at scale. The managed rule for encrypted RDS storage automatically detects DB instances and clusters that are created without encryption enabled.

By configuring automatic remediation, AWS Config can immediately invoke corrective actions without manual intervention. Integrating remediation with an Amazon SNS topic enables automated email notifications, while an AWS Lambda function can terminate the noncompliant resource. This creates a fully automated detect-alert-remediate workflow.

Option B requires manual remediation, which increases operational effort and delays enforcement. Options C and D rely on Amazon EventBridge, which evaluates events rather than configuration state and does not provide continuous compliance monitoring. AWS Config is explicitly designed for configuration compliance and governance use cases.

This solution aligns with AWS governance best practices by combining continuous monitoring, automated remediation, and centralized alerting with minimal operational overhead.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Config Managed Rules

AWS Config Automatic Remediation

AWS Audit Manager is specifically designed to help organizations continuously audit their AWS usage against compliance frameworks and generate audit-ready reports. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Audit Manager includes AWS managed frameworks for compliance standards, including PCI DSS v4.0.

Audit Manager automatically collects evidence from AWS services such as API Gateway, Lambda, RDS, CloudTrail, and Config, and maps the evidence directly to PCI DSS controls. Importantly, Audit Manager allows compliance teams to upload and attach manual evidence, which is a key requirement in this scenario.

Option C provides visibility into control status but does not support adding manual evidence. Option B evaluates configuration compliance but does not generate formal compliance reports. Option A requires extensive manual effort and is not aligned with PCI reporting workflows.

AWS documentation positions Audit Manager as the authoritative service for compliance reporting and audit evidence management.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

AWS Audit Manager PCI DSS Framework

AWS Compliance Reporting Best Practices

Amazon CloudWatch Logs is designed to collect, store, and analyze log data from ephemeral compute resources such as EC2 instances in Auto Scaling groups. According to the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Study Guide, using the CloudWatch agent to stream logs off instances ensures log durability even when instances are terminated during scale-in events.

CloudWatch Logs Insights provides a fully managed, serverless query engine that enables ad hoc querying, filtering, and aggregation of log data without requiring additional infrastructure. This directly satisfies the requirement to query logs for application sessions and user troubleshooting.

Option A introduces operational risk because logs could be lost between cron executions. Option B requires additional services and data pipelines, increasing cost and complexity. Option E adds storage cost and management overhead and is not necessary for log analytics.

AWS best practices recommend CloudWatch Logs and Logs Insights as the most cost-effective and scalable solution for centralized log retention and analysis in Auto Scaling environments.

Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide

Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Logs Insights

AWS Logging Best Practices