Book Image

Implementing Identity Management on AWS

By : Jon Lehtinen
Book Image

Implementing Identity Management on AWS

By: Jon Lehtinen

Overview of this book

AWS identity management offers a powerful yet complex array of native capabilities and connections to existing enterprise identity systems for administrative and application identity use cases. This book breaks down the complexities involved by adopting a use-case-driven approach that helps identity and cloud engineers understand how to use the right mix of native AWS capabilities and external IAM components to achieve the business and security outcomes they want. You will begin by learning about the IAM toolsets and paradigms within AWS. This will allow you to determine how to best leverage them for administrative control, extending workforce identities to the cloud, and using IAM toolsets and paradigms on an app deployed on AWS. Next, the book demonstrates how to extend your on-premise administrative IAM capabilities to the AWS backplane, as well as how to make your workforce identities available for AWS-deployed applications. In the concluding chapters, you’ll learn how to use the native identity services with applications deployed on AWS. By the end of this IAM Amazon Web Services book, you will be able to build enterprise-class solutions for administrative and application identity using AWS IAM tools and external identity systems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: IAM and AWS – Critical Concepts, Definitions, and Tools
9
Section 2: Implementing IAM on AWS for Administrative Use Cases
13
Section 3: Implementing IAM on AWS for Application Use Cases

Governance

We've spent the last several pages detailing the mechanics of access management and authorization. It may seem tautological as to why we would want to enact a sound access management policy; we want to protect our AWS resources. However, there are also legal and regulatory requirements that we need to fulfill, such as least privilege, evidence of events, and audit. We will now look at a couple tools available to us to fulfill the governance requirements that come with access management.

Access Analyzer

Access Analyzer is a feature of AWS IAM that helps highlight potential weaknesses in existing authorization policy. As we've seen over the course of this chapter, there are many inputs, options, and places where a policy change could have unintended consequences for access control. As we start intertwining additional AWS accounts, and perhaps even AWS accounts not owned or managed by our own organization, it becomes increasingly important (and difficult) to...