Enhancing Granular Security: AWS Config Now Supports Resource Tags for IAM Policies
Seattle, WA – September 5, 2025 – Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a significant enhancement to its security and compliance management service, AWS Config. In a move that will empower organizations with even more granular control over their AWS environments, AWS Config now supports resource tags for IAM Policies. This new capability, published today at 15:00 PDT, allows customers to associate tags directly with IAM policies, enabling more sophisticated evaluation, auditing, and management of access control configurations.
For many organizations, managing access to AWS resources is a critical and often complex undertaking. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are the cornerstone of this access control, defining who can do what on which resources. However, as the scale and complexity of cloud deployments grow, so does the challenge of effectively tracking, auditing, and ensuring the adherence of these policies to organizational standards and regulatory requirements.
The introduction of resource tagging for IAM policies marks a pivotal step in addressing these challenges. Previously, while AWS Config could inventory and track IAM policies, the ability to group, filter, and apply policies based on custom metadata was limited. With this update, AWS Config can now ingest and report on tags associated with IAM policies, unlocking a wealth of new possibilities for security and governance.
What Does This Mean for Your Organization?
This new feature significantly enhances the ability to:
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Improve Policy Auditing and Compliance: Organizations can now tag IAM policies based on criteria such as compliance scope (e.g., PCI DSS, HIPAA), project ownership, or environment (e.g., production, development). This allows for more targeted and efficient auditing of policies relevant to specific compliance frameworks or business units. For example, you could easily filter and review all policies tagged with “PCI DSS” to ensure compliance with payment card industry regulations.
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Streamline Resource Management: Tagging IAM policies simplifies the process of categorizing and managing them. This can be particularly beneficial for large organizations with numerous policies, allowing for easier identification and organization of policies related to specific applications, teams, or security zones.
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Enhance Operational Efficiency: By leveraging tags, security and operations teams can create more dynamic and automated workflows. This could include automated alerts for policy changes on tagged resources or the ability to quickly identify policies impacting a specific set of tagged applications.
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Facilitate Security Investigations: In the event of a security incident, the ability to quickly identify and analyze IAM policies associated with specific tags can drastically reduce investigation time and pinpoint the source of access configurations.
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Support Policy-as-Code Initiatives: For organizations adopting a Policy-as-Code approach, the ability to tag and manage IAM policies programmatically further strengthens their ability to automate security and compliance checks throughout the development lifecycle.
How It Works:
With this update, when you create or modify an IAM policy in AWS, you can now associate tags directly with that policy resource. AWS Config will then automatically discover and record these tags alongside other policy configuration data. This information can be accessed and utilized within AWS Config’s existing features, including:
- Resource Inventory: View IAM policies with their associated tags in your AWS Config inventory.
- Config Rules: Develop custom AWS Config rules that leverage these tags for more intelligent compliance checks. For instance, a rule could be created to flag any IAM policy lacking specific compliance tags.
- Conformance Packs: Group related Config rules and custom resource collections, now enhanced with tag-based filtering for IAM policies, into comprehensive conformance packs.
- AWS Config Aggregator: Aggregate IAM policy tag information from multiple AWS accounts and regions for a consolidated view of your security posture.
This enhancement represents AWS Config’s ongoing commitment to providing robust tools for managing cloud security and compliance. By extending resource tagging capabilities to IAM policies, AWS is empowering customers with the precision and flexibility needed to navigate the complexities of modern cloud security. This development is a welcome addition for any organization prioritizing a secure, compliant, and well-managed AWS environment.
AWS Config now supports resource tags for IAM Policies
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