Hunting IAM Drift Across Multi-Cloud Estates

The Drift Dilemma Cloud IAM policies start clean but sprawl over time. Emergency access, troubleshooting tweaks, and acquisitions leave behind excessive privileges. Attackers thrive on this drift.

Establish Your Baseline Inventory every identity—human and workload—across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Compare granted permissions against role templates. Flag deviations automatically. If you lack a single source of truth, build one before continuing.

Detect Drift Continuously Use cloud-native tools (Config, Access Analyzer) and open-source projects (Cartography, Steampipe) to query policy changes daily. Pipe the results into dashboards and alerts. Prioritize identities with wildcard permissions, legacy access keys, or unused roles.

Remediate with Guardrails Adopt least privilege by design. Implement permission boundaries, service control policies, and just-in-time elevation using access brokers. Document exception procedures so business-critical operations are not blocked.

Communicate the Wins Share metrics with leadership: percentage of roles aligned to baseline, number of stale privileges removed, incidents prevented. Governance becomes sustainable when executives see tangible risk reduction.