Q16: Visualizing a Data Lake With Tiered Access for Management vs Everyone Else

Problem Info

Domain	Design Secure Architectures
Services	Amazon QuickSight, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Difficulty	Easy–Medium

Question

A data lake spans S3 and RDS for PostgreSQL. The company needs a reporting solution with data visualization that includes all data sources. Only management should have full access to all visualizations; everyone else gets limited access.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Correct Answer

Create an analysis in Amazon QuickSight. Connect all data sources and build datasets. Publish dashboards, and share them with the appropriate specific users and groups.

Why this is correct

Amazon QuickSight is AWS’s managed business intelligence and visualization service, and it directly supports both halves of this requirement.

First, connecting sources: QuickSight can connect natively to both Amazon S3 (including via Athena for querying) and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, letting you build unified datasets and dashboards that blend data from across the data lake — satisfying “includes all the data sources.”

Second, and just as important for this question, is the access control model: published QuickSight dashboards can be shared with specific IAM users or QuickSight groups, with fine-grained control over who sees what. You can grant the management group full access to every dashboard, while sharing a restricted subset (or a filtered view via row-level security) with everyone else — matching “management gets full access, the rest gets limited access” without building a separate access-control system.

Why the alternatives fall short

• Export data to spreadsheets and share via S3 with bucket policies controlling access — technically enforces access tiers, but loses interactive visualization entirely and requires manual export/refresh cycles — poor fit for “data visualization,” and not scalable.
• Build a custom web dashboard on EC2 that queries S3 and RDS directly — could visualize the data, but you’d be building and maintaining your own authentication/authorization layer, database connectors, and rendering — far more operational overhead than a managed BI tool built for exactly this.
• Use Amazon Athena alone for querying, with IAM policies restricting query access per user — Athena provides SQL query access, not interactive dashboards/visualizations; it doesn’t natively address “data visualization,” which is the primary requirement here.

Exam Tip

“Data visualization” + “multiple data sources (S3, RDS, Redshift, etc.)” + “different access levels for different user groups” → Amazon QuickSight. Remember QuickSight’s access control operates at the level of dashboards shared with users/groups, and can go further with row-level security for restricting specific data within a shared dashboard — useful when a question asks for partial rather than all-or-nothing visibility.