AWS Security Blog

Michael Switzer

Author: Michael Switzer

Use tags to manage and secure access to additional types of IAM resources

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now enables Amazon Web Services (AWS) administrators to use tags to manage and secure access to more types of IAM resources, such as customer managed IAM policies, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) providers, and virtual multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices. A tag is an attribute that consists of a key […]

How to define least-privileged permissions for actions called by AWS services

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. February 21, 2020: We fixed a missing comma in a policy example. March 3, 2020: […]

Use IAM to share your AWS resources with groups of AWS accounts in AWS Organizations

September 19, 2023: This post has been update to correct an explanation of multivalued condition keys. You can now reference Organizational Units (OUs), which are groups of AWS accounts in AWS Organizations, in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, making it easier to define access for your IAM principals (users and roles) to the […]

How to use service control policies to set permission guardrails across accounts in your AWS Organization

September 19, 2025: This post was updated to reflect that AWS Organizations now offers full IAM policy language support for service control policies (SCPs). Details of this new feature are outlined in this post. AWS Organizations provides central governance and management for multiple accounts. Central security administrators use service control policies (SCPs) with AWS Organizations […]