Our automated data archival jobs to S3 are suddenly failing with ‘Access Denied’ errors. The jobs worked perfectly for months, but after our security team implemented new compliance tagging requirements last week, everything broke. The bucket policy now requires specific compliance tags on all PUT operations.
The error message shows:
AccessDenied: Access Denied
Status Code: 403
Request ID: ABC123XYZ
Our archival automation runs nightly and moves historical data from RDS to S3 for long-term storage. The S3 bucket policy has tag-based conditions that our security team added for GDPR compliance, but our archival scripts don’t include these tags. We need to maintain compliance while keeping the archival process running. Has anyone dealt with S3 bucket policy tag conditions blocking automated uploads?
Thanks! I found the bucket policy and it requires two tags: ‘DataClassification=Sensitive’ and ‘RetentionPeriod=7years’. How do I add these tags during the S3 upload? We’re using AWS CLI in our bash scripts for the archival jobs.
We implemented similar compliance tagging for our archival process last quarter. One thing to watch out for - if you’re doing multipart uploads, you need to include tags in the CompleteMultipartUpload call, not the InitiateMultipartUpload. Also, verify that your bucket policy condition uses StringEquals and not StringLike, because the latter can cause unexpected matches.
For AWS CLI, use the --tagging parameter with your put-object command. The format is ‘Key1=Value1&Key2=Value2’. However, make sure your IAM role also has s3:PutObjectTagging permission, not just s3:PutObject. I’ve seen cases where the upload succeeds but tagging fails silently, which then triggers the bucket policy denial. Also consider using S3 default encryption with bucket-level tags if all your archived data has the same classification.
I updated the CLI command to include --tagging ‘DataClassification=Sensitive&RetentionPeriod=7years’ but still getting Access Denied. The IAM role has s3:PutObject and s3:PutObjectTagging permissions. Could the bucket policy condition be checking for something else?
Your archival scripts need to include the required compliance tags in the PUT request headers. Check what tags the bucket policy is expecting - usually something like ‘DataClassification’ or ‘ComplianceLevel’. You’ll need to modify your upload code to include these as object tags during the PUT operation.