A company manages a data lake in an Amazon S3 bucket that many applications access. The bucket uses a unique prefix for each application. The company wants to restrict each application to its specific prefix and have granular control over objects under each prefix. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Creating dedicated S3 access points and access point policies for each application is the most efficient solution. S3 Access Points allow you to create distinct hostnames with specific permissions for accessing data in a shared bucket. An access point policy can restrict access to a particular prefix, ensuring each application only interacts with its designated data. This provides granular control without duplicating data or complex IAM policies, minimizing operational overhead. S3 Batch Operations to set ACLs is overly complex and less flexible than access points, as ACLs are object-level and managing them for a data lake would be cumbersome. Replicating objects to new buckets increases storage costs, data transfer costs, and operational complexity, making it inefficient.