A company's AWS accounts are in an organization in AWS Organizations. An application in Account A uses environment variables that are stored as parameters in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. A dev

Question

Options

• AConfigure the application in Account B to use credentials for an IAM user in AccountA that has
• BCreate an assumable IAM role in Account A. Grant the role the permission to access the
• CConfigure cross-account resource sharing for the parameters by using AWS Resource Access
• DWrite a script that stores the parameter values in a private Amazon S3 bucket that both accounts

• A
  3% (1)
• B
  83% (25)
• C
  10% (3)
• D
  3% (1)

Explanation

Option B is correct because AWS IAM role assumption (via STS) is the native, recommended pattern for cross-account access. By creating an IAM role in Account A with a trust policy that allows Account B to assume it, plus a permissions policy granting read access to the Parameter Store parameters, Account B's application can assume that role at runtime and read the parameters directly - no duplication, no long-term credential management.

• Option A is wrong because sharing IAM user credentials across accounts is a security anti-pattern. Long-term access keys are risky and harder to rotate, and AWS explicitly discourages this approach in favor of role assumption.
• Option C is wrong because AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) does not support Systems Manager Parameter Store as a shareable resource type - RAM works for resources like VPC subnets, Transit Gateways, and License Manager configurations, not SSM parameters.
• Option D is wrong because copying parameter values into S3 duplicates the data (violating the requirement) and introduces a custom script to maintain, which increases operational overhead significantly.

Memory tip: For cross-account access to AWS services, the answer is almost always IAM role assumption - think "trust policy + permissions policy = cross-account bridge." Any option involving shared IAM user credentials or data duplication is a red flag on the exam.

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