AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and how they can use resources (authorization).
IAM Features
IAM gives you the following features:
Shared access to your AWS account
You can grant other people permission to administer and use resources in your AWS account without having to share your password or access key.
Granular permissions
You can grant different permissions to different people for different resources. For example, you might allow some users complete access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and other AWS services. For other users, you can allow read-only access to just some S3 buckets, or permission to administer just some EC2 instances, or to access your billing information but nothing else.
Secure access to AWS resources for applications that run on Amazon EC2
You can use IAM features to securely give applications that run on EC2 instances the credentials that they need in order to access other AWS resources, like S3 buckets and RDS or DynamoDB databases.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
You can add two-factor authentication to your account and to individual users for extra security. With MFA you or your users must provide not only a password or access key to work with your account, but also a code from a specially configured device.
Identity federation
You can allow users who already have passwords elsewhere—for example, in your corporate network or with an Internet identity provider—to get temporary access to your AWS account.
Identity information for assurance
If you use AWS CloudTrail, you receive log records that include information about those who made requests for resources in your account. That information is based on IAM identities.
PCI DSS Compliance
IAM supports the processing, storage, and transmission of credit card data by a merchant or service provider, and has been validated as being compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS). For more information about PCI DSS, including how to request a copy of the AWS PCI Compliance Package, see PCI DSS Level 1.