How should the company securely share the database with the auditor?
Create a read replica of the database and configure IAM standard database authentication to grant the auditor access.
Copy a snapshot of the database to Amazon S3 and assign an IAM role to the auditor to grant access to the object in that bucket.
Export the database contents to text files, store the files in Amazon S3, and create a new IAM user for the auditor with access to that bucket.
Make an encrypted snapshot of the database, share the snapshot, and allow access to the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption key.
Explanations:
IAM database authentication only allows Amazon RDS users within the same AWS account to connect. It does not facilitate access across accounts via a read replica.
Copying a snapshot to Amazon S3 is not a straightforward or direct method for database sharing, as it requires additional work to secure and import the snapshot data.
Exporting the data to text files and storing them in Amazon S3 does not meet the requirements of sharing a full database instance and introduces additional complexity and potential data integrity issues.
Creating an encrypted snapshot, sharing it with the external AWS account, and allowing access to the AWS KMS encryption key securely provides the auditor with a copy of the database in their account.
I gauge that the answer is:
Make an encrypted snapshot of the database, share the snapshot, and allow access to the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption key.