- Free to use : AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) features of your AWS account offered at no additional charge. you are charged only when you access other AWS services.
- 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.
Example : IAM User with Administrator access policy
- Granular permissions : You can grant different permissions to different people for different resources.
Example : you might allow some users complete access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DynamoDB,
- Centralized control of your AWS account: You can control Create, Modify and cancellation of each user’s security credentials at IAM Dashboard.
- Secure access to AWS resources for applications that run on Amazon EC2 : IAM features to securely provide credentials for applications that run on EC2 instances. These credentials provide permissions for your application to access other AWS resources.
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA) : You can add two-factor authentication to your account and to individual users for extra security.
Example : Virtual Authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator), Security Key (YubiKey or other supported FIDO security key),
Hardware TOTP token(Time-based one-time password)
- PCI DSS Compliance : PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a compliance framework. If you are taking credit card information, then you need to pay for compliance with the framework.
- Integrated with many AWS services : Giving special/particular access for AWS Services using IAM. [2]
- Identity information for assurance : Logs each and every action made using user accounts using the services Cloud Trail
- 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.
For Official Documentation [1]
Read More :
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/introduction.html?icmpid=docs_iam_help_panel
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/reference_aws-services-that-work-with-iam.html