Finest Approaches for AWS Identity & Access Management
                     Finest Approaches for AWS Identity 
& Access Management
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Identity and Access Management is often abbreviated as 
IAM, and it’s an essential term that you’ll frequently 
encounter all across AWS. So, it is essential to have a 
reasonable comprehension of how it works. As the name 
implies, IAM is a permission framework that controls 
access to AWS services. It aids in defining who has access 
to what in an AWS account. Secondly, IAM users enable 
you to give groups of users or even individual users broad 
or specific permissions. Broad permissions can include 
items like granting access to an entire AWS service, such 
as DynamoDB, while specific permissions can include 
read and write access to a specific S3 bucket. Thirdly, IAM 
offers a method for monitoring and editing access to 
unique resources by enabling AWS Cloud Trail. Finally, 
those of you working in large corporations with current 
identity management systems would be happy to learn 
that AWS IAM will easily integrate with them.
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How do AWS Identity and Access Management work?
In order to know how AWS IAM works, you must be familiar with the four 
basic concepts, which can be defined as:
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• Users: Users are identifiable individuals, and with IAM, you can give each 
one login and password so they can access the AWS console on their own. 
However, they’ll have a restricted set of permissions that you specify. Users 
have secret keys and secret access keys, which are used as inputs in your 
application-level code when setting up clients.
• Groups: Then there are groups, which essentially apply to a collection of 
users that share a mutual interest. Permissions are different for different 
groups. Specific users of a group are subject to the same permissions and 
policies that are defined for the group as a whole.
• Roles: Then we have roles, which are similar to user accounts in AWS. We 
attach policies to roles as we do for the users. In AWS IAM, we provide the 
access permissions to roles instead of a user. If an instance wants to access 
an AWS account, we’ll make it a role so that it can access the account without 
a login id and password. Roles can also be used by an AWS service to access 
another VM.
• Policies: Finally, there are policies, which is an AWS object that determines 
the permissions of identity or resource when it is connected with it. When an 
IAM principal (user or role) makes a request, AWS evaluates these policies. 
They come in two variations: allow or deny. The policy permissions decide 
whether the request is allowed or denied.
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AWS IAM Best Practices
Here are some best practices that must be followed while using 
IAM to secure your Cloud Infrastructure:
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1. Make use of the Least Privilege Model : You must provide the user with 
the bare minimum of permissions they need to complete their assignment. Don’t 
give people too many permissions because this could result in security flaws or 
people unintentionally deleting production database tables. So, using the least 
privilege model is a wise approach.
2. For privileged users, allow multi-factor authentication (MFA): For 
protecting enterprise data and networks, strong passwords are important, but they 
aren’t enough. A breach in authentication causes the majority of attacks. Security 
experts widely recommend Multi-factor authentication. AWS also recommends that 
all privileged IAM users use multi-factor authentication. Users that have access to 
APIs or other sensitive tools fall into this category. AWS users have a few options for 
enabling the second level of authentication, including security token-based 
authentication and SMS authentication.
3. When changing policies, use caution: It’s all too easy to change a policy 
without thinking about it, only to discover that one of your development applications 
was using it and suddenly lost access to a resource. Just be cautious when making 
changes to the IAM configuration in development.
4. For added protection, use policy conditions: Policies are a series of JSON 
statements that grant users specific permissions. AWS has introduced an optional 
component called ‘Conditions’ to policies to provide more security. The condition 
block always returns a boolean output: ‘true’ or ‘false,’ indicating whether the 
request is granted or denied by the policy.
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5. Remove any credentials that aren’t needed: It is always recommended 
to audit user credentials regularly and remove them if they are no longer in use. AWS 
has a ‘credential report’ that allows you to monitor the lifecycle of passwords and 
access keys right out of the box. The report contains user information, the date the 
account was established, the last time the password was used, and the last time the 
password was changed. If you’ve set a password rotation policy, this report will also 
include the date and time that the user must change their password.
6.Where possible, assign permissions using AWS-defined policies: If 
you’re new to AWS and have trouble creating and maintaining your own policies for 
various job functions, consider starting with AWS-defined policies wherever possible. 
These policies are well-aligned with a broad spectrum of traditional information 
technology roles. The auto-update functionality provided by AWS is a significant 
benefit of using these policies. Since these policies are modified whenever a new AWS 
service or API is released, they are still up to date. This saves a significant amount of 
time and makes life simpler.
7.Assign Permissions to IAM Users Using Groups: Creating groups and 
assigning permissions to them is often simpler than defining permissions for individual 
users. This allows you to build several groups for different job functions and assign 
appropriate permissions to each group before assigning users to those groups. This 
way of handling permissions is not only more straightforward, it’s much safer and 
easier to handle.
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