GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your company ingests financial transaction records from multiple regions into a dual-region Cloud Storage bucket. Compliance regulations require that every object remain intact and undeleted for at least seven years. After the seven-year period, objects should be removed automatically to avoid unnecessary storage costs. Platform administrators must not be able to override the retention requirement. What should you do to meet these needs with minimal ongoing operational effort?

Change the bucket's storage class to Archive and instruct administrators to delete objects manually once they reach seven years of age.
Set a seven-year bucket retention policy, lock the policy, and add a lifecycle rule that deletes objects older than 2,555 days.
Turn on default event-based holds for the bucket and require uploaders to release the hold after seven years so objects can be deleted.
Enable Object Versioning on the bucket and configure a lifecycle rule to delete live and noncurrent object versions after 2,555 days.

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Answer Description

A bucket-level retention policy set to seven years enforces an immutable hold on every object: no one-including project owners-can delete or overwrite data until the retention period expires. Locking the policy makes it permanent and prevents privileged users from shortening or disabling it, satisfying the "must not be able to bypass" constraint. When the retention window elapses, the objects become eligible for deletion; a complementary Object Lifecycle Management rule that deletes objects whose age exceeds 2,555 days (~7 years) will automatically clean them up, eliminating manual effort. Enabling only versioning plus a lifecycle rule does not stop an administrator from deleting all versions ahead of schedule. Simply switching to the Archive class offers lower cost but no enforced retention. Default event-based holds still require someone to release the holds manually, so they do not ensure automatic deletion and introduce operational overhead. Therefore, applying and locking a seven-year retention policy and adding an age-based lifecycle delete rule is the correct approach.

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