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AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) uses a set of tools, policies, processes, and protocols used to manage identities and control access to resources within AWS. IAM allows admins to manage permissions to systems and the workforce.
Users in AWS refer to employees, partners, or contractors with access to your AWS environment. Access refers to the actions permitted to a user. These include creating, viewing, deleting, changing files, etc. Furthermore, different sets of users can be further segmented depending on their roles in an organization.
AWS IAM controls which users can access business systems, when they can get it, and what they can do. It follows a granular approach in providing access controls and permissions within your environments.
What are the Major Components of AWS IAM?
Users
Groups
Roles
An IAM role is an identity that you can create and assign specific permissions. These permissions determine what an identity can do and can’t do in AWS.
An AWS role is not associated with a specific person but can be assumed by anyone who needs it. Also. IAM roles don’t have long-term access keys or passwords associated with them. Once a user assumes a role, it gives temporary security credentials for the session.
Policies
There are two types of policies:
- Inline Policies
These are policies applied directly to IAM identities. They are used for specific objectives and are non-reusable.
- Managed Policies
These types of policies are attached to multiple entities. That covers various use cases and can be matched and mixed to give generalized access to groups, users, and roles.
AWS recommends managed policies are they are more standardized and you can reuse them.
Permissions
Permissions enable AWS users to perform actions on resources. You can assign permission to users, groups, and roles in two ways:
- Identity-Based policies
- Resource-based policies
Identity-based policies are attached directly to roles, groups, or users, while resource-based policies are attached to AWS resources such as EC2 Instances, S3 buckets, and more.
What Are the Main Features of AWS IAM?
Multifactor authentication (MFA)
IAM multifactor authentication is w users take more than one step for authentication before accessing AWS resources. It combines various user-known credentials such as passwords, biometrics, or a security token such as OTP.
IAM enhances security as it controls user access. Unauthorized users find it hard to bypass security credentials, protecting your organization from hacking, ransomware, and other cyber attacks.
Besides security, IAM helps achieve compliance. Most regulatory standards like GDPR and HIPAA require companies to implement the IAM best practices.
Password Policy
A password policy is a set of rules that dictate how users can create and manage passwords. A password policy dictates the following instances:
- Minimum number of characters
- Password strength
- Use of personal details
- A mix of alphabets and special characters
- Password expiration period
- Password reuse
The user can customize the default password policy to fit their business needs.
Shared Access to the AWS account
With AWS IAM, you can grant some users permission to perform admin actions without sharing your access key and password credentials. This is especially important if you are operating in an immensely tiered organization or running multiple accounts.
Granular Permissions
The Bottom Line
Managing AWS requires using the right tools, policies, and services. You can rely on IAM to control access to your cloud resources or use third-party tools such as nOps.
At nOps, we provide the ultimate AWS management tool to help you orchestrate various activities in AWS. You can use nOps to check users without MFA using IAM roles and IAM groups alongside other security and compliance capabilities.
Start your nOps free trial today or schedule a demo to see it live in action.
