A company stores data in an Amazon S3 bucket.

The correct answer is B because Amazon S3 Lifecycle rules can manage versioned objects, including noncurrent object versions . In a versioning-enabled bucket, the newest object version is the current version, and older ones become noncurrent versions. The requirement is to keep the current version and only the immediately previous version. S3 Lifecycle is the native feature designed to expire or retain noncurrent versions according to policy.

AWS documentation explains that lifecycle configuration for versioned buckets can specify how many newer noncurrent versions to retain before Amazon S3 permanently removes older noncurrent versions. This directly matches the requirement to preserve only the latest prior version while cleaning up older historical versions automatically.

Option A is incorrect because an S3 bucket policy controls access permissions, not retention behavior for object versions. Option C is incorrect because S3 Object Lock is intended for write-once-read-many retention and legal hold scenarios, not for maintaining only one previous object version. Option D is not appropriate because suspending versioning would stop creation of new full versions going forward, but it would not provide an automated retention policy for existing versions, and modifying the application adds unnecessary complexity.

Using an S3 Lifecycle rule is the most operationally efficient and AWS-native solution. It allows the bucket to continue using versioning for protection against accidental overwrites while automatically limiting retained noncurrent versions to only what the business needs. Therefore, B is the correct answer.