About This Domain
Domain 4 — Data Security and Governance — accounts for 18% of the DEA-C01 certification exam. This domain evaluates your understanding of iam roles, policies, and least privilege for data services, encryption at rest and in transit with kms, s3 sse, and redshift encryption, fine-grained access control with lake formation, column/row filtering, and lf-tags, and related concepts. Domain 4 validates your ability to apply authentication, authorization, encryption, auditing, and data governance controls across data engineering workloads. To pass this section you need practical knowledge of how these services and patterns work together in real-world architectures.
What You'll Be Tested On
- IAM roles, policies, and least privilege for data services
- Encryption at rest and in transit with KMS, S3 SSE, and Redshift encryption
- Fine-grained access control with Lake Formation, column/row filtering, and LF-Tags
- Data governance and cataloging with the Glue Data Catalog
- Auditing and compliance with CloudTrail, AWS Config, and Macie
- Data masking, tokenization, and PII detection with Glue and Macie
Key AWS Services in This Domain
Study Strategy for Domain 4
While 18% might seem like a smaller portion of the exam, every point counts toward the passing score. Focus on understanding core concepts and common exam scenarios for this domain. Don't neglect it — even a few missed questions here can make the difference between pass and fail.
Exam Tips for Domain 4
Lake Formation centralizes data lake permissions and replaces complex S3 bucket policies and IAM policies for data access.
Know the difference between S3 SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, and SSE-C encryption options.
CloudTrail data events can track S3 object-level access for compliance auditing.
Macie uses machine learning to discover and protect sensitive data like PII in S3.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many questions on the DEA-C01 exam come from Domain 4?
Domain 4 (Data Security and Governance) makes up 18% of the DEA-C01 exam. The exam has 65 scored questions, so approximately 12 questions will come from this domain.
What services should I focus on for Domain 4?
The key services for this domain include IAM, KMS, Lake Formation, CloudTrail, AWS Glue, S3. Make sure you understand how each service works, its use cases, and how they integrate with one another.
How should I prepare for Data Security and Governance questions?
Start by reviewing the key topics listed above, then practice with domain-specific questions. Focus on understanding real-world scenarios rather than memorizing facts. Use our practice quizzes to test your knowledge and review explanations for any questions you get wrong.
What's the best order to study the DEA-C01 domains?
Many candidates start with the highest-weighted domains first. For the DEA-C01 exam, the domains in order of weight are: Data Ingestion and Transformation (34%), Data Store Management (26%), Data Operations and Support (22%), Data Security and Governance (18%). However, start with whichever domain aligns best with your existing experience.
Practice Domain 4 Questions
Test your knowledge of Data Security and Governance with practice questions from our DEA-C01 question bank.
Start Practice Quiz →