The Challenge
For many AWS customers and partners, securely accessing customer environments remains one of the hardest steps in any engagement. Even with mature IAM practices, partners often rely on long-lived cross-account roles or shared credentials to perform setup or maintenance tasks. It works, but it’s far from ideal.
Customers worry about control. Granting broad, persistent access feels risky, especially in regulated industries where auditability and least privilege are mandatory.
Partners face onboarding friction. Manual IAM setup slows activation and creates delays before value can be delivered.
Security teams inherit operational debt. Static roles and credentials expand the attack surface and make ongoing reviews complex.
This combination of friction, risk, and overhead directly affects both customer trust and business velocity. Every hour spent troubleshooting IAM or waiting for access is time not spent delivering outcomes.
A New Approach: AWS IAM Temporary Delegation
AWS introduced IAM Temporary Delegation to solve exactly this problem. It provides a modern, just-in-time access model that lets partners like Aviatrix operate securely within customer environments — without permanent credentials or open-ended permissions. Here’s how it works:
Temporary Access: Aviatrix requests time-bound access for a specific task or configuration step.
Customer Approval: The customer reviews and approves each request with full visibility into what’s being granted.
Scoped Execution: Aviatrix performs only the approved actions, on behalf of the customer, within the defined limits.
Public Policies: Aviatrix has developed least-privilege IAM policies and permission boundaries specifically for IAM temporary delegation. This ensures every delegation follows AWS best practices for least privilege and safety.
Access expires automatically once the task is complete. Nothing lingers. Nothing to rotate or revoke later. This model dramatically reduces security risk while removing the administrative drag of manual IAM setup — a clear win for both sides.
Why It Matters: Business and Security Value
1. Faster, Easier Customer Onboarding
For many organizations, the biggest barrier to adopting new technology isn’t the product, it’s the process of connecting it. Temporary Delegation makes onboarding almost instant. Customers can approve a clearly defined access request in minutes, and Aviatrix can begin delivering value immediately.
Business value:
Faster time-to-value for customers
Shorter deployment cycles for partners
Fewer back-and-forth security reviews
2. Stronger Security Posture
Replacing long-lived credentials with short-lived, auditable access closes one of the most common gaps in cloud operations. Every access request is precise, time-bound, and fully transparent to the customer. There are no lingering roles to monitor, no shared keys to protect, and no ambiguity about what was accessed.
Security value:
Enforces least privilege by design
Reduces exposure windows
Builds customer trust through AWS-validated policy controls
Simplifies compliance evidence and audit readiness
3. Scalable, Trust-Driven Operations
Manual IAM configuration doesn’t scale, especially for partners supporting hundreds of customer accounts. Automated, time-limited delegation eliminates the bottlenecks of manual role management and ensures a consistent, secure process across every environment.
Operational value:
Eliminates repetitive IAM setup work
Standardizes security practices
Enables growth without additional risk
Extending the Cloud Native Security Fabric
Aviatrix applies zero trust principles to how workloads communicate across clouds — enforcing segmentation, encryption, and policy control in real time. Integrating with AWS IAM Temporary Delegation extends that same discipline to how Aviatrix connects to customer environments during onboarding and configuration.
Time-limited access. Permissions are granted only for the duration of a specific task, then automatically revoked.
Scoped to purpose. Each request defines the exact actions required, ensuring least-privilege access for every interaction.
AWS-pre-approved design. All partner IAM policies are reviewed and validated by AWS before they are used for delegation, providing customers with additional assurance that permissions align with AWS security best practices.
This integration creates a unified approach to trust — from onboarding through runtime enforcement — giving customers a simpler, more secure operating model without increasing complexity or overhead.
A Shared Commitment to Simplifying Cloud Security
Aviatrix and AWS share a goal: making secure cloud operations easier, not harder. Temporary Delegation achieves exactly that: reducing friction for customers while elevating their security posture. Together, this integration extends the reach of Cloud Native Security Fabric — from how Aviatrix enforces zero trust within workloads, to how it earns and maintains trust with every customer account it touches.
Explore the free Aviatrix Workload Attack Path Assessment to see your cloud the way an attacker does.
