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SAA-C03 Practice Question 53: IAM Identity Center SSO

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 6 · question 3 of 10

Identity & Access Managementmedium

A company runs 60 AWS accounts in a single AWS Organizations organization and already operates a SAML 2.0 corporate identity provider that holds every employee and group. Engineers currently have a separate IAM user in each account they work in. The company wants employees to sign in with their existing corporate credentials, get a role appropriate to their job function in whichever accounts they are entitled to, and have access removed everywhere the moment they leave, with as little per-account administration as possible.

Which approach should the solutions architect recommend?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • A. Enable IAM Identity Center for the organization, connect the corporate SAML provider as the identity source, and assign permission sets to directory groups across accounts

IAM Identity Center is built for exactly this. An organization instance deployed in the management account federates once with the external SAML provider (one trust, one certificate to rotate), and then permission sets are defined centrally and provisioned as roles into whichever member accounts you assign them to. Assignments are made to groups synchronised from the corporate directory, so removing an employee there removes their access to all 60 accounts at once. There are no IAM users and no long-lived credentials.

Option B still relies on IAM users and long-lived access keys, which is the credential model the company is trying to get away from, and it leaves joiner/leaver handling as a manual task separate from the corporate directory.

Option C is the wrong identity product. Cognito user pools and identity pools are for an application's *customers*, end users of a web or mobile app, not for workforce access to the AWS console and CLI across many accounts.

Option D does produce working federation, and it was the standard pattern before Identity Center existed, but it multiplies the administration by 60: a SAML provider and a certificate to rotate in each account, roles to keep in sync, and a separate sign-in entry point per account. It meets the functional requirement while failing the explicit "as little per-account administration as possible" constraint.

Reference: What is IAM Identity Center?

Practice Test 6 ›

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