Cloud Maturity Series – Post 2: Identity Is the Real Perimeter

Identity Is the Real Perimeter

When people talk about cloud security, they often focus on firewalls, VPCs, or encryption. But in reality, the biggest security boundary is identity.

Before any workloads exist, the way humans and services access AWS determines how safe, auditable, and scalable your environment will be.

Key Actions Taken

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
– All administrative access flows through IAM roles, not IAM users.
– Eliminated standing privileges to prevent credential misuse.
– Temporary credentials ensure that even if a role is compromised, exposure is time-limited.

Centralized Authentication with AWS IAM Identity Center (SSO)
– Users authenticate through a single source of truth.
– Permission sets replace ad-hoc IAM policies, reducing configuration drift.
– MFA enforced for every human identity.

Benefits
– Human access is predictable, auditable, and easily revoked.
– Simplifies future multi-account AWS Organizations setups.
– Reduces risk of accidental privilege escalation and lateral movement.

Account Application

In practice, this was applied across logical account layers:
– Management/Shared Services Account: SSO, permission sets, and role templates centrally managed.
– Dev Account: Developers use temporary roles scoped to non-production resources.
– Prod Account: Minimal direct human access; all actions require role assumption via SSO.

This pattern ensures least-privilege access everywhere, even before any workloads are deployed.

Keywords
– AWS IAM, RBAC, IAM Identity Center, SSO
– Least-privilege, temporary credentials, enterprise access control
– Multi-account readiness, production security baseline

Bottom line:
Cloud security isn’t about locking down VPCs first — it’s about locking down who can get in and what they can do. Identity is the real perimeter.