AWS IAM Identity Center

AWS IAM Identity Center, the successor to AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO), is a centralized identity management service that makes it easy to manage single sign-on access across all Amazon Web Services accounts and business cloud applications. By unifying human identity management into a single administrative portal, IAM Identity Center eliminates the complexity of configuring separate IAM users in individual accounts, allowing enterprises to assign and audit user permissions centrally across multi-account AWS Organizations.

The service provides flexible identity sourcing, enabling organizations to connect their existing enterprise identity providers—such as Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Okta, Ping Identity, and Google Workspace—via the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0) and System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocols. Alternatively, administrators can manage identities directly within the built-in Identity Center directory. Through intuitive permission sets, administrators can assign multi-account role permissions based on job roles, team memberships, or attribute-based access control (ABAC) tags. End users receive a streamlined user portal providing one-click single sign-on access to all assigned AWS accounts, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and integrated third-party SaaS applications with multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforcement.

Key enterprise use cases include centralized multi-account workforce access management, enterprise identity provider federation, single-pane CLI session authorization, SaaS single sign-on consolidation, and access compliance auditing. By unifying workforce access governance, AWS IAM Identity Center strengthens security postures while simplifying user experience.