AWS IAMAccessAnalyzerReadOnlyAccess Managed Policy

What the policy is for

AWS IAMAccessAnalyzerReadOnlyAccess Managed Policy is a narrowly scoped AWS managed policy for visibility into IAM Access Analyzer. It is useful when teams need to inspect analyzers and review findings without granting the ability to modify configuration or suppress evidence.

That read-only posture matters because Access Analyzer is often used during security review, account hygiene work, and exposure triage. The policy supports those workflows by separating observation from control, which helps preserve change discipline in shared cloud environments.

Why read-only access still matters

Read-only access is not a low-value permission set. Findings can reveal exposed resources, trust relationships, cross-account access, and other account-level signals that help a reviewer understand how access is granted and where exposure may exist.

In practice, that means the policy can be appropriate for analysts, auditors, or responders who need insight into analyzer output but should not be able to alter analyzers, hide findings, or change the security posture they are assessing.

For a broader treatment of IAM policy types, trust relationships, and evaluation logic, see AWS IAM Policies and Roles Guide.

Where it fits in cloud access control

This policy sits in the standard cloud access-control pattern of separating observation, administration, and privilege-bearing actions. That separation is especially important for security tooling, where the person reviewing a finding should not automatically inherit the ability to change the resource that generated it.

It also fits naturally alongside cloud entitlement review and least-privilege work. Read-only visibility into Access Analyzer can support permission review, but it should still be granted only where the role’s job function requires exposure to account relationships and analyzer output.

For related cloud privilege-management patterns, see Cloud PAM and CIEM Guide.

For a broader perspective on cloud workload and identity access models, see Cloud Workload Identity Guide.

Operational use and review boundaries

The main operational question is not whether the policy is safe in the abstract, but whether the holder truly needs recurring visibility into analyzer data. Because findings can expose trust paths and resource relationships, broad distribution can create unnecessary internal visibility into sensitive account structure.

Use the policy as part of a bounded review process, not as a general-purpose cloud viewer role. If the role’s purpose is investigation, audit support, or exposure triage, the read-only model is a good fit. If the role needs to remediate findings, a different permission set should be used instead of stretching this one beyond its intent.

For the larger identity and access governance context around AWS policies and permission boundaries, see AWS IAM Policies and Roles Guide.

Risk and Threat Considerations

Read-only analyzer access can still expose meaningful security intelligence. Findings may reveal externally reachable resources, cross-account trust, and account relationships that help an attacker map where to look next, especially if the permission is granted too widely.

Failure mechanism: A user with unnecessary read access can harvest exposure data, correlate trust relationships, and use that visibility to accelerate reconnaissance or target follow-on abuse of weakly protected paths.

Impact: The result is not direct configuration change, but better attacker understanding of the environment, slower detection of exposure, and a wider blast radius if the same role is assigned more broadly than intended.

Practitioner Guidance

Why practitioners should care: Treat this policy as a visibility grant, not a harmless observer role. In cloud security work, read-only access to findings can still disclose sensitive structure, so it should be tied to a specific review function and an accountable owner.

Governance implication: Assign it only to roles that genuinely need analyzer output for triage, audit, or investigation, and keep remediation authority separate so review and control are not collapsed into one entitlement.

Practitioner takeaway: If the job is to inspect exposure, this policy is appropriate; if the job is to fix exposure, use a different access path and keep the review role narrowly bounded.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• AWS AmazonEKSMCPReadOnlyAccess Managed Policy
• AWS AdministratorAccess Managed Policy
• AWS AmazonBedrockFullAccess Managed Policy
• AWS AmazonBedrockLimitedAccess Managed Policy