An insurance company stores transaction data that the company compressed with gzip. The company needs to query the transaction data for occasional audits. Which solution will meet this requirement…

Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval offers the lowest storage cost for archival data that is accessed infrequently, aligning with 'occasional audits.' Amazon S3 Glacier Select allows running SQL queries directly on data stored in Glacier without needing to restore the entire object, significantly reducing the cost and time for occasional selective data retrieval.

Storing data directly in Amazon S3 Standard or S3 Intelligent-Tiering is more expensive than Glacier storage classes for infrequently accessed archival data, and while S3 Select works, the overall storage cost would be higher.

Using Amazon S3 for storage combined with Amazon Athena for querying would incur higher storage costs than Glacier for archival data. Athena queries also scan entire objects or partitions, which could be more expensive for selective queries compared to Glacier Select.

Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval has higher storage costs than Glacier Flexible Retrieval. Furthermore, Amazon Athena cannot directly query data stored in Glacier Instant Retrieval; data must be restored to S3 Standard first, adding complexity and cost.