Domain 4 · 16% of Exam

Security and Compliance

Domain 4 covers operational security controls, compliance evidence, identity troubleshooting, encryption, vulnerability detection, and governance.

What You'll Be Tested On

  • IAM users, roles, policies, permission boundaries, federation, MFA, and least privilege
  • Encryption with KMS, key policies, grants, rotation, S3/EBS/RDS encryption, and Secrets Manager
  • Compliance monitoring with AWS Config rules, conformance packs, aggregators, and remediation
  • Threat and vulnerability detection with GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector, WAF, and Shield
  • Audit evidence and account governance with CloudTrail, Organizations, SCPs, and centralized logging

Key AWS Services in This Domain

Exam Tips for Domain 4

💡

When access is denied, check identity policies, resource policies, permission boundaries, SCPs, session policies, and explicit denies.

💡

Default encryption protects future data, but bucket policies or service controls are needed when uploads must be rejected unless a specific key is used.

💡

AWS Config detects configuration drift and compliance gaps; it does not block an action unless paired with remediation or preventive controls.

💡

Security Hub aggregates findings; GuardDuty detects threats; Inspector scans workloads for vulnerabilities.

Practice Domain 4 Questions

Test your knowledge of Security and Compliance with practice questions from our SOA-C03 question bank.

Start Practice Quiz →

Other SOA-C03 Domains