AWS IAM Users vs. Identity Center & JIT: Is Your Cloud Access Strategy Secure or Stalling?

by | Aug 15, 2025 | Guest blogs

This article was originally written by Cloudanix

Introduction

The way we manage access in AWS has changed IAM dramatically. When many organizations first ventured into the cloud, creating individual AWS IAM users directly within each account was standard practice. Fast forward to today, and most of the mature and evolved companies have adopted a multi-account strategy using AWS Organizations, and many are now moving towards AWS Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) for centralized identity management.

This evolution brings us to a critical question: Is your current cloud access strategy truly secure and scalable, or is it silently stalling your progress and introducing unnecessary risk? Perhaps you’re managing multiple AWS accounts (like your Dev, 3 Prod environments, and a Management account), grappling with a user base of around 150 engineers and DevOps folks, and are already on the path of migrating to AWS Identity Center with your existing Identity Provider (like Google). Your journey is commendable, but there’s a vital next step to unlock true cloud access maturity.

The real power lies in combining a centralized identity management hub like AWS Identity Center with dynamic, time-bound Just-in-Time (JIT) access. This isn’t just about streamlining logins; it’s about fundamentally transforming your security posture and operational efficiency in an increasingly complex cloud landscape.

The Legacy Challenge: Why AWS IAM Users Fall Short at Scale

Let’s start by understanding why the traditional approach of relying heavily on individual AWS IAM users is simply not scalable for modern cloud operations.

An IAM user is essentially a static identity with long-term credentials (passwords, access keys) directly tied to a single AWS account. While IAM users serve a purpose, their limitations become clear as your cloud environment grows:

  • Decentralized Management Chaos: Imagine trying to manage access for 150 users across four distinct AWS accounts. You’re creating, updating, and deleting IAM users in each account individually. This quickly devolves into a manual nightmare, leading to inconsistencies, configuration drift, and a high likelihood of human error. Your Cloud and DevOps teams are constantly context-switching between accounts just to manage identities.
  • Persistent Credentials = Persistent Risk: This is a major headache for any Head of Security. When an IAM user has long-lived access keys or passwords, those credentials represent a persistent attack surface. If compromised, an attacker can gain access and make detection and containment incredibly difficult. The longer the credential lives, the higher the risk.
  • Auditing Headaches: When compliance time rolls around, trying to trace who did what, when, and from where across a network of individual IAM users and their scattered logs is a painful, time-consuming process. It’s like trying to reconstruct a complex crime scene with only scattered footprints – you might get some clues, but a complete picture is nearly impossible.
  • Permission Sprawl & “Role Creep”: It’s common for IAM users to accumulate more permissions than they actually need over time. An engineer gets elevated access for a project, and it’s never revoked. This “role creep” violates the principle of least privilege, significantly expanding your attack surface. Manual cleanup efforts are often sporadic and ineffective.
  • Scaling Pain Points: Onboarding new engineers, offboarding departing employees, rotating credentials, or simply ensuring consistent security policies across hundreds of individual IAM users becomes an unachievable operational burden for your already busy DevOps teams. It’s a never-ending cycle of manual toil.
  • Limited SSO Integration: While some complex federation setups are possible, IAM users don’t offer the unified, native Single Sign-On (SSO) experience that users expect today with their corporate identities.

Think of it this way: Managing IAM users at scale is like trying to manage access to a rapidly expanding, multi-story office building by handing out individual, unique physical keys for every single door to every single employee. There’s no central control, keys get lost or duplicated, and ensuring someone only has access to their specific office for specific hours becomes an impossible task.

The Centralized Solution: AWS Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO)

This is where AWS Identity Center steps in as AWS’s recommended path forward for workforce access. It’s designed to be the central hub for managing access to all your AWS accounts and cloud applications for your entire workforce. Your decision to move to AWS Identity Center is a critical step towards modernizing your cloud access strategy, laying a strong foundation for secure and efficient operations.

Here’s how AWS Identity Center addresses many of the challenges posed by traditional IAM users:

  • Centralized User Management: Instead of creating individual IAM users in each account, you manage all your workforce identities from a single place. Whether you’re connecting your existing Identity Provider (IdP) like Google SSO (as you are) or using Identity Center’s own directory, you get one central point of truth for user access.
  • Seamless SSO Experience: Users log in once through your corporate IdP (e.g., Google SSO) and then gain access to all their authorized AWS accounts and applications without re-authenticating. This greatly improves user experience as well as productivity.
  • Permission Sets for Scalability: AWS Identity Center introduces Permission Sets, which are reusable collections of permissions. You can define common job functions (like “DevOps Engineer,” “Cloud Auditor,” or “Read-Only Access”) and assign them to users or groups consistently across multiple AWS accounts. This simplifies access management for your diverse user base, including engineers, DevOps, and customer success teams.
  • Native Integration with AWS Organizations: Identity Center is built for AWS Organizations, allowing you to manage access across your entire multi-account structure with clear, hierarchical governance.
  • Improved Auditability: With centralized access management, Identity Center provides consolidated access events and logs, making it far easier for security teams to track who accessed what, when, and from which account. This significantly streamlines compliance reporting and security investigations.
  • Eliminates Long-Term Credentials (for console access): A huge win for security! When users access AWS via Identity Center, they are granted temporary credentials, which automatically expire. This dramatically reduces the risk associated with static, long-lived access keys and passwords.
  • No Agents Needed: AWS Identity Center (and Cloudanix) operate externally to your individual AWS accounts, assuming roles to grant access. This means no agents or complex infrastructure deployments within your sensitive environments, aligning with a secure, minimalist deployment model.

AWS Identity Center is a powerful tool that moves you towards a more secure, scalable, and manageable cloud access posture. However, even with Identity Center, there’s still an opportunity to limit people’s permissions to when they need that access.

The Missing Piece: Why Identity Center Needs Just-in-Time (JIT) Access

While AWS Identity Center represents a massive leap forward from individual IAM users, the question “Is your cloud access strategy still stalling?” remains valid. Why? Because without Just-in-Time (JIT) access, you might leave critical security gaps and operational inefficiencies unresolved:

  • Standing Permissions within Permission Sets: Even with Identity Center, if you assign a broad permission set like “AdministratorAccess” to a user for an indefinite period, that’s still standing access. It’s certainly better than an IAM user with static credentials that can be lost, but the security risk, while reduced, still exists. For a Head of Security, any standing permission is a risk.
  • Manual Activation & Deactivation for Elevated Access: This is precisely where your current pain points arise. For elevated permissions or access to non-development environments, your team still relies on manual approvals, assignments, and most critically, calendar reminders to revoke permissions. AWS Identity Center natively handles the assignment of permission sets, but it doesn’t automatically activate them only when needed and then revoke them the moment the task is complete. This means your DevOps team is still burdened with manual intervention for sensitive access.
  • The “Least Privilege” Gap: While Identity Center enables you to define least privilege through granular permission sets, JIT access enforces it by ensuring those permissions are active for the precise moment of need – no longer. This dynamic, ephemeral access is the true embodiment of least privilege in action.
  • Operational Friction for Granular, Time-Bound Access: Consider a DevOps engineer who needs elevated access to an EKS cluster in production for just 30 minutes to troubleshoot an issue. While you might have a broad “EKS Administrator” permission set in Identity Center, assigning it for a short, specific window and then immediately revoking it manually is cumbersome. JIT is how you can achieve this without slowing down the engineer or compromising security.
  • Bridging the Automation Gap: Your existing automation tooling may do a great job with read-only and dev environment access. However, JIT access completes the picture by automating the entire lifecycle of even the most elevated, time-bound permissions. It fills the gap where your automation currently stops and manual intervention begins.

This is where a dedicated JIT access solution seamlessly integrates with AWS Identity Center to provide:

  • Dynamic, Time-Bound Access: Permissions are granted on-demand, for a defined, minimal duration (e.g., 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours). Access automatically expires, eliminating the risk of standing privileges.
  • Automated Lifecycle Management: From request to approval, instant provisioning, and automatic revocation – say goodbye to manual calendars, forgotten reminders, and the associated security risks.
  • Informed Review & Approval: The JIT solution displays exactly what entitlements and permissions the requestor will receive before approval, ensuring reviewers understand the full scope of access being granted, especially critical for high-privilege roles like administrator access.
  • Granular Control & Auditability: Every JIT request, approval, and revocation is meticulously logged, creating an immutable, clear audit trail that dramatically boosts compliance and simplifies security investigations.
  • External Role-Based Operation: A robust JIT platform works externally, just like Identity Center, by assuming roles within your AWS accounts. This agentless approach means minimal footprint and maximum security.

The result? Enhanced security posture through eliminating standing privileges that dramatically shrink your attack surface, plus improved developer and operations agility as engineers get precise access exactly when needed.

Completing Your Workforce Cloud Access Journey: The Power of Identity Center + JIT

Your organization is already on a strong path if you are leveraging Google IdP for identity and in the process of adopting AWS Identity Center. This is the modern foundation for cloud access. To truly secure your cloud operations and empower your teams, the logical next step is to integrate a purpose-built Just-in-Time access platform like Cloudanix.

Imagine taking your current process a step further: where your team raises an access request in Jira, and it’s automatically approved for read-only or dev environments (perhaps via your existing automation workflows). But for elevated or non-dev access, a JIT platform steps in. It provides time-bound access, automatically revokes it the instant it’s no longer needed, and meticulously logs every action. This moves you beyond manual approvals and those easily forgotten calendar reminders, achieving a state of “zero standing access” for critical operations.

This powerful combination also future-proofs your access strategy. It lays the foundation for scalable workforce access management, whether you’re expanding into Azure environments or seeking to secure sensitive database access with temporary tokens, or managing EKS clusters. Across all these scenarios, it means precise control: engineers only assume the necessary roles and permissions for the exact duration required, enhancing both security and operational flexibility.

The outcome? A cloud environment that is not only highly secure and compliant but also incredibly agile and productive, ready to scale with your business and tackle future multi-cloud challenges head-on.

Take Control: Secure Your Cloud Access Today

Moving beyond basic IAM users to a centralized hub like AWS Identity Center is crucial. But integrating a Just-in-Time access solution is the key to unlocking its full potential for security, efficiency, and unwavering compliance. This transition isn’t just about implementing new tech; it’s about empowering your security and DevOps teams to operate effectively and safely at cloud scale.