Managing access in AWS can seem simple at first: a few accounts, a handful of users, and permissions that are easy to control from the console. But as an organization grows — as accounts, teams, and roles multiply — that manual management becomes a problem. Errors accumulate, inconsistencies appear, and traceability fades.
Who has access to what? What permissions does each user actually have? What changes were applied last week? These once-trivial questions become increasingly difficult to answer.
That’s where AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS Single Sign-On) comes in. This service centralizes the management of identities and permissions across all your AWS accounts, letting you define from a single place who can access what, and with which level of privilege. It also simplifies auditing and compliance by maintaining a consistent record of assignments and permissions.
However, the existence of IAM Identity Center alone doesn’t solve scalability challenges — manual configuration doesn’t scale. Each user, group, and permission set must be configured account by account, multiplying effort and increasing the likelihood of mistakes. Keeping environments consistent is difficult, and auditing changes becomes a tedious, unreliable process.
In short: manual management isn’t sustainable in the long run.
The solution lies in automating with Terraform, leveraging the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach. With Terraform, your entire configuration is defined in version-controlled files — you can review, replicate, and apply changes in a consistent and auditable way. This not only reduces errors but also turns access management into a scalable, controlled, and well-documented process.
