AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Practice Question

The correct action is to configure a lifecycle policy that automatically transitions the S3 objects to Glacier after a certain period of infrequent access and ultimately expires (deletes) them after 5 years. This approach utilizes Amazon S3's capability to transition data to less expensive storage classes and defines a schedule to delete old data, which together optimize costs while complying with retention policies. Using less frequent access storage classes before archival and then deleting the data aligns with the cost optimization and data retention requirement. Using Intelligent-Tiering may incur additional costs without meeting the specific audit retention timeframe, as it does not ensure deletion after the required period. Setting a policy to store all data in S3 Standard would not be cost-optimized due to the higher cost of the S3 Standard storage class over a long period. Manually deleting the data is prone to human error and is not reliable for compliance.