Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM in cloud providers like AWS and GCP controls who can access what resources within your cloud environment. It lets you define users, groups, and roles, and then assign permissions to those roles. These permissions determine what actions users and services can perform, such as reading data from a database, creating virtual machines, or managing network configurations. IAM helps you enforce the principle of least privilege, granting only the necessary access to perform specific tasks, thereby minimizing the potential impact of security breaches.