Cloud IAM Policy Design

What it is

Cloud IAM policy design defines exactly which identities (users, services, roles) can perform which actions on which resources — the single most consequential access-control surface in a cloud environment.

Key points

• Least privilege in practice: start from zero permissions and add only what's needed, rather than starting from broad access and trying to narrow it later — the latter almost never actually happens once something works.
• Service accounts / workload identities are a common over-permissioning risk — a service given broad admin access "to be safe" becomes a high-value target if compromised, since it can act with all of those permissions.
• Policy evaluation logic (explicit deny overriding allow, resource-based vs. identity-based policies) needs to be understood precisely — cloud IAM systems have real, exploitable subtleties in how overlapping policies combine.
• Regular access reviews catch permission creep — access granted for a past project that was never revoked is one of the most common real-world cloud security findings.