A Guide to Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM)

The cloud offers unparalleled scalability, agility, and cost efficiency for businesses. However, this flexibility comes with a security challenge of ensuring the right users, applications, and services have access to the right resources at the right time. This is where cloud identity and access management (Cloud IAM) comes into play.

IAM Basics: Understanding Identity and Access Management

At its core, identity and access management (IAM) is a framework that governs access to IT resources. IAM helps organizations provide access to the right information or services, while protecting against unauthorized access. It ensures only authorized parties can access specific resources, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.

In cloud environments, Cloud IAM takes this concept a step further, providing a centralized system for managing identities and access controls across all cloud services and resources.

Cloud Security IAM

Traditional on-premise IT environments used to have well-defined security perimeters, making it easier to control access. However, cloud environments present a different challenge. Resources are spread across geographically distributed data centers, accessed by a wider range of users, devices, and applications. This distributed nature necessitates a more centralized and scalable approach to identity and access management in the cloud.  

Many cloud providers offer native resources for managing identity and access management, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) IAM, Azure Active Directory (AD), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) IAM. These Cloud IAM resources help organizations improve security, offer scalability, and simplify administration. 

Let’s look at some of the key benefits that Cloud IAM offers an organization. 

Simplified Administration

With Cloud IAM, organizations can manage user identities and access controls from a single location, eliminating the need to configure security settings on individual cloud resources.

Improved Security

Cloud IAM helps enforce strong authentication and authorization policies across all cloud services, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

Scalability

Cloud IAM can easily accommodate a growing number of users, applications, and resources within the cloud environment.

An Example of Cloud IAM in Action

Let’s explore a real-world example of how Cloud IAM can be used to secure a cloud storage bucket. Imagine a company that stores sensitive marketing data in a cloud storage bucket on a cloud platform like GCP. 

Users

The company has various user groups with different access needs, which includes the marketing, sales, and IT teams.

• The marketing team requires full access (read, write, delete) to modify and manage the marketing data.
• The sales team needs read-only access to view the marketing materials but cannot modify them.
• The IT team has full administrative control over the storage bucket for maintenance purposes.

Access Controls

Using GCP IAM, the company can create specific roles with predefined sets of permissions for each user group.

• A MarketingManager role with read, write, and delete permissions.
• A SalesViewer role with read-only permissions.
• An ITAdmin role with full administrative privileges.

Identity Management

The company can integrate GCP IAM with its existing Active Directory to leverage centralized user management and provide more granular security to cloud environments.

By implementing this Cloud IAM strategy, the company ensures that only authorized users have access to the marketing data, the marketing team can manage their data efficiently, the sales team can access the information they need without compromising data integrity, and the IT team retains full control for maintenance and troubleshooting.

IAM in Enterprise Cloud Security

IAM is an important component of overall enterprise cloud security. It provides organizations granular access control, helps ensure compliance and protect against insider threats, and provides a central platform for managing access control.

Granular Access Control

Cloud IAM enables organizations to define granular access policies that specify who or what can access what resources (and under what conditions). This ensures that access privileges are aligned with business requirements and that users only have access to the resources necessary for their roles. 

For example, a healthcare organization using a cloud-based medical records system could use IAM to restrict access to patient information. This helps the organization ensure the safety of the patient data and ensures compliance with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Security Compliance

Effective Cloud IAM helps organizations ensure compliance with regulations, like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the aforementioned HIPAA, implementing security controls, auditing access activities, and maintaining an audit trail of user actions.

Insider Threats

Insider threats, whether intentional or unintentional, pose a significant risk to enterprise cloud security. Identity and access management solutions can detect and prevent unauthorized access attempts, suspicious behavior, and privilege misuse, thereby reducing the risk of insider threats.

Centralized Management

Identity and access management also provides a centralized platform for managing identities, access policies, and authentication mechanisms across similar cloud environments. This helps streamline administration tasks, improve visibility, and simplify the enforcement of security controls.

Cloud IAM Best Practices  

Some of the best practices in Cloud IAM include leveraging the following.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Leveraging MFA adds an extra layer of protection by requiring multiple authentication factors, such as passwords and one-time codes. An example of this would be requiring cloud users to enter a code from Google Authenticator as part of the login process.  

Least Privilege 

The principle of least privilege means granting users, applications, or systems only the permissions needed to perform the required function. For example, someone working in the accounting department does not need to have administrative privileges to the organization’s cloud infrastructure because their daily job tasks do not involve managing the cloud infrastructure.

Granular Access Control

Organizations can use RBAC to assign access permissions based on predefined roles within the organization. Using the previous healthcare organization example, all new nursing staff could be assigned the role of nurse, which would grant them specific privileges in the cloud-based medical records system.

Cloud IAM also allows you to define access controls based on factors like user attributes, IP address, time of day, geographic location, and the resource type. This enables organizations to build access policies tailored to their specific needs.

Access Logging and Auditing

Tracking access activity across cloud resources can help organizations identify potential breaches and ensure compliance. It can also help organizations during incident response investigations. This audit trail is similar to how a physician documents your office visits so they can spot changes in your health over time.

Identity Federation

Identity federation helps organizations simplify Cloud IAM user management and authentication processes by facilitating seamless access to multiple cloud services with a unified set of credentials. An example of this is using your Gmail account to log into your social media accounts.  

Service Accounts

Service accounts are special identities used by applications to access cloud resources.  Organizations should manage their service account keys carefully and rotate them periodically to improve their overall security posture.

Third-Party Integrations

Many cloud providers offer integration with third-party identity providers (IdPs) like Okta or Microsoft Entra ID. This allows for centralized management of identities across cloud and on-premises resources.

IAM in Enterprise Security

Let’s look at an example of how Cloud IAM can be used in the AWS cloud for a financial institution.

The organization can use MFA and enforce it for all AWS IAM users and root accounts, which can help protect against unauthorized access. IAM policies can then be used to grant permissions strictly as needed, which helps minimize the risk of data exposure.

Cloud IAM roles could then be defined by the organization (like the previous nursing role example), where the access is tailored to just what the user needs to perform their daily job functions. AWS CloudTrail could be leveraged for monitoring the audit trail. And finally, identity federation could be used to integrate corporate credentials with AWS services. This allows a user to just use one set of credentials to access everything they need to perform their job.

Conclusion 

Cloud IAM helps organizations control access to cloud resources. It provides features like centralized administration, granular access control, and improved security to ensure only authorized entities can access specific resources. Cloud IAM helps organizations comply with regulations, protect against insider threats, and simplify cloud security management.

Cloud IAM can be complex and organizations need qualified cybersecurity professionals to help them secure their cloud environments. The Cybersecurity Engineering program at Flatiron School can help you build foundational cybersecurity skills to help secure cloud environments. You can apply to the program today or download the syllabus to get a look at what you will learn. 

Disclaimer: The information in this blog is current as of April 22, 2024. Current policies, offerings, procedures, and programs may differ.