Skip to content
← Intel Brief
Enterprise · Cloud

Your IAM is your perimeter now

Why cloud breaches keep tracing back to identity — and a practical hardening checklist for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Digital identity perimeter surrounding cloud infrastructure
AN3 Security · · 7 min read

The firewall moved. Your IAM policies are now the outer wall — and most teams still treat them like internal plumbing.

The checklist

  1. Enforce MFA on every human and service principal
  2. Maximum session duration: 1 hour for privileged roles
  3. No inline policies — use managed policies with version control
  4. Quarterly access reviews with automated stale-role detection
  5. Break-glass accounts: two, monitored, never used in normal operations

AN3 Intel Brief · Cloud defense across AWS, Azure, and GCP.