Amazon Web Services
Phillip Hanegan
Kim Landis (Unlicensed)
Before connecting EmpowerID to an external directory, please review the Getting Started with Directory Systems topic. The topic walks you through the prerequisites you need to complete before connecting to an external directory for the first time. These prerequisites include:
- Configuring the appropriate server roles for your EmpowerID servers
- Reviewing the Join and Provision Rules for your environment
- Reviewing the Join and Provision Filters for your environment
EmpowerID provides connectors for a wide range of user directories and resource systems. As an administrator, you can use these connectors to quickly connect EmpowerID to your organization's identity-aware systems and applications. When you do so, you create an account store for that application in the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse and use that account store to configure how you want EmpowerID to manage the identity information in that system.
EmpowerID includes an Amazon Web Services (AWS) connector that allows organizations to bring the data (user accounts, groups, roles and computers) in their AWS domain to EmpowerID, where it can be managed and synchronized with data in any connected back-end user directories. When EmpowerID inventories AWS, it creates an account in the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse for each Amazon user account, a computer for each Amazon computer, a group for each Amazon group, and a special group called an RBAC-Only group for each Amazon role.
Additionally, EmpowerID provides Provisioning policies or Resource Entitlements that allow you to automatically provision Amazon accounts for any person within your organization based on their role. For more information on Resource Entitlements, see Configuring Provisioning Policies.
Prerequisites: In order to connect EmpowerID to AWS, you must have an AWS domain with an account that EmpowerID can use to connect to AWS. (EmpowerID recommends using a dedicated service account.) At a minimum, this account must have a policy with permission to read the user, group and computer data in AWS. If you plan to use EmpowerID to provision, deprovision and modify this data in AWS, the profile needs to have create, update and delete permissions as well. In addition, you must provide EmpowerID with the following information:
- Access Key ID for the service account
- Secret Access Key for the service account
- AWS Site Name
- AWS TenantID
After ensuring you have met the prerequisites specified in the Getting Started with Directory Systems topic, you connect EmpowerID to AWS by doing the following:
- Creating an account store in EmpowerID for AWS.
- Configuring EmpowerID settings for the account store connection, including whether to provision EmpowerID Persons during inventory or in batches using the Account Inbox permanent workflow (recommended).
- Reviewing and configuring the attribute flow rules for the account store.
- Turning on inventory.
- Enabling the Account Inbox Permanent Workflow when ready—if you are using batch processing to provision Person objects from the inventoried user accounts. This is the recommended method.
- Monitoring Inventory.
Before connecting EmpowerID to a directory system, you should determine whether you want EmpowerID to provision Person objects from the user accounts it discovers in the account store. If you do, then you should be able to answer the following questions before turning on inventory.
- When do you want EmpowerID to provision Person objects for those user accounts? At inventory or at a later point in time using the Account Inbox (recommended)?
- If inventory provisioning is desired, in what Business Role and Location should those Person objects be placed?
- How many user accounts can one Person have in the account store?
- If people can have more than one user account in the account store, do you want EmpowerID to attempt to automatically join any user accounts meeting the conditions of your Join rules to an existing Person during inventory?
- Do you want attribute flow to occur between EmpowerID and the account store? If so, what rules do you want to apply?
- If you have Resource Entitlement policies in place, do you want EmpowerID to apply them to the account store?
To create an account store for AWS via the web site
- In the Navigation Sidebar, expand Admin, then Applications and Directories, and click Account Stores and Systems.
- Click the Actions tab, and then click the Create Account Store action.
- Select Amazon AWS from the list of system types and click Submit.
On the AWS Settings page that appears, enter settings to connect to your Amazon instance to allow EmpowerID to discover and connect to it.
- Site Name - The address of your AWS site
- Client Key - The Access Key ID generated by Amazon for the service account
- Client Secret - The Secret Access Key generated by Amazon for the service account
- Tenant ID - The Tenant ID for your AWS site
- Click Submit. The Account Store and associated Resource System are created and appear in both the web application and in the Management Console.
To edit account store settings on the web
- In the Navigation Sidebar, expand Admin, then Applications and Directories, and click Account Stores and Systems.
- On the Account Stores tab, search for the account store you just created and click the link to go to its details page.
- On the Account Store Details page, click the Edit button or the name of the account store.
- In the edit view of the page, you can edit values in any of the enabled fields. In the General section, these are:
- Display Name – Edit the name of the account store as it appears in the list of account stores.
- Proxy Connection Account – Change the instance, user name, and password for t