cloud IAM
termcloudsecurity
Stands for: Identity and Access Management
The permission system of a cloud platform - who and what may call which interface on which resource.
It differs from traditional access control in that machines are first-class subjects: most of the identities in a mature account are workloads, not people, and their credentials are issued automatically. That is the improvement and the risk, because a permissive role attached to a compute instance is reachable by anything that can run code on it. The recurring finding is scope - wildcards granted during setup and never narrowed, because nobody knows which of them is now load-bearing.
Also known as: Identity and Access Management, iam