Companies and organizations are taking different security measures to protect the cloud from cyber-threats. Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) is available to assist with these issues.
IAM allows you to grant granular access to certain Google Cloud resources. It also helps to prevent access to other resources. This allows you to adopt the security principle of least privilege. It states that no one should be granted more permissions than they need. IAM can be described as granulated access control that allows central management of cloud resources.
IAM’s capabilities are what make it more special. Let’s now understand them.
Abilities of Identity and Access Management
1. Access control for enterprises
Identity and Access Management (IAM), which allows administrators to authorise who can take action on specific resources, gives them complete control and visibility to centrally manage Google Cloud resources. IAM provides a single view of security policy across your entire organization, even for complex organizations with many workgroups and projects. This software includes built-in auditing to simplify compliance processes.
2. Simplicity
IAM was specifically designed to be simple. It is a simple interface that allows you manage access control for all Google Cloud resources.
3. Right roles
IAM tools allow you to control resource permissions with less worry, and more automation. This is how IAM works.
Firstly, map the job functions within your company to groups or roles.
Second, users have access to only what they need to do the job.
Administrators can also easily grant default permissions to entire groups of users.
4. Smart access control
It can be time-consuming to manage permissions. Administrators can use Recommenders to manage permissions. They use machine learning to make smart access control recommendations. Security teams can also automatically detect permissive access and rightsize them based on access patterns and similar users within the organization using Recommender.
5. Granular with context-aware accessibility
IAM allows you to create granular access control policies for resources. These policies are based on attributes such as IP address, resource type and device security status. These policies also help to ensure that appropriate security controls are in place while granting access to cloud resources.
6. Easy enterprise identity
Google Cloud Identity supports identity management. Google Cloud can create or sync user accounts across applications and projects by simply using its managed identity. It’s also easy to do from the Google Admin console.
Firstly, provisioning, managing users and groups
Second, you can set up a single sign-on
Configuring two-factor authentication (2FA) is also possible.
IAM is a working entity
IAM is used to control access control by identifying who has access to what resource. Google Cloud resources include Google Kubernetes Engine clusters, Compute Engine virtual machines instances and Cloud Storage buckets.
However, IAM doesn’t grant permission to access a resource directly to the end-user. Instead, permissions are broken down into roles and given to authenticated members. An IAM policy outlines the roles that are granted to which members and who this policy is linked with a resource. IAM also examines the policy of the resource to determine if the action is allowed when an authenticated member attempts access to the resource.
Diagram for permission management in IAM
Image Source: GCP. This model is for access management. It has three parts:
1. Member
A member can be:
Google Account
Service account
Google group
Google Workspace
Cloud Identity domain.
The ident however,