I need to tighten access for colleagues who currently have overly broad administrator policies. They work entirely through the web console and should only be able to manage users and groups in IAM Identity Center and upload files to one specific S3 bucket.
I'm a full administrator, but everyone signs in through SSO using Entra ID, so I can't easily create a normal test account that can authenticate independently. Adding myself to their access group would remove my administrator permissions, forcing someone else to restore them whenever I need to test a change or review CloudTrail. What's the safest way to validate these permissions without repeatedly affecting my own access?
4 Answers
Define and validate the policies with infrastructure as code or a policy-analysis tool instead of relying only on manual clicks. The console ultimately calls APIs governed by IAM, so automated policy checks and repeatable deployments reduce the risk of accidentally changing your own administrator access. Still perform a final test with a separate low-privilege identity because some permissions affect the console experience.
For IAM Identity Center, create a permission set containing the intended policies and assign it to a separate test user or group. You can then sign in through the console as that identity and verify exactly what works and what is denied, without changing your administrator session.
Another option is to create a role with the proposed permissions and assume it from your administrator account. Switching roles in the console gives you a practical way to test the user experience, although it doesn’t completely replace testing an actual SSO assignment if the sign-in flow itself matters.
Create a separate test identity rather than modifying your day-to-day administrator account. A dedicated SSO user or test assignment lets you sign in with the same kind of access as the target users. A separate browser profile or Firefox container makes it easier to keep the test session isolated from your admin session.
The target is an SSO user rather than a role, so I’d use the role approach mainly for quick policy checks and keep a dedicated permission-set assignment for final console validation.