About IAM

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that enables AWS customers to manage users and user permissions in AWS. The service is targeted at organizations with multiple users or systems that use AWS products such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console. With IAM, centrally manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and permissions that control which AWS resources users can access.

Without IAM, organizations with multiple users and systems must either create multiple AWS accounts, each with its own billing and subscriptions to AWS products, or employees must all share the security credentials of a single AWS account. Also, without IAM, there is no control over the tasks a particular user or system can do and what AWS resources they might use.

IAM addresses this issue by enabling organizations to create multiple users (each user is a person, system, or application) who can use AWS products, each with individual security credentials, all controlled by and billed to a single AWS account. With IAM, each user is allowed to do only what they need to do as part of the user's job.

There are two methods by which one can set up Identity and Access Management for your SoftNAS Cloud® instance:

• Creating the IAM Role for SoftNAS Cloud®
• Specifying the IAM User for SoftNAS Cloud®

We strongly recommend creating the IAM Role prior to setting up your instance, as it is the more secure method. Specifying an IAM User for your SoftNAS Cloud® instance is used when adding IAM functionality to existing instances.

Note: There is no need to create both the IAM Role and an IAM user. It is one or the other.