Amazon Web Services Connector

Owned by
Phillip Hanegan
Last updated: Jun 01, 2021
6 min read

EmpowerID Amazon Web Services (AWS) connector allows organizations to bring the user, group, role and computer data 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.

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, you do the following to connect EmpowerID to AWS:

  1. Create an account store in EmpowerID for AWS.

  2. Configure 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).

  3. Review and configure the attribute flow rules for the account store.

  4. Turn on inventory.

  5. Enable 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.

  6. Monitor Inventory.

Step 1 – Create an account store for AWS

  1. On the navbar, expand Admin, then Applications and Directories, and click Account Stores and Systems.

  2. On the Account Stores page, click Create Account Store.

     

  3. Select Amazon AWS from the list of system types and click Submit.

    This opens the AWS Settings form, which is where you enter information about your Amazon AWS instance needed to connect EmpowerID to it.

     

  4. Enter the following information in the AWS Settings form to connect EmpowerID to your Amazon instance:

    • Site Name — The address of your AWS site

    • Client API Key — The Access Key ID generated by Amazon for the service account

    • Client API Secret — The Secret Access Key generated by Amazon for the service account

    • Tenant ID — Tenant ID for your AWS site

  5. Click Submit.

  6. EmpowerID creates the account store and the associated resource system. The next step is to configure the attribute flow between the account store and EmpowerID.

 

Step 2 – Configure Attribute Flow

 

EmpowerID supports the configuration of attribute synchronization rules for flowing attribute changes between directories and the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse. Attribute Flow rules are visually configured and are always relative to the relationship between an attribute in a directory and the corresponding attribute in the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse. Attribute Flow rules define the specific fields and attributes that are synchronized between the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse person objects and the external user accounts to which they are linked. Additionally, Attribute Flow rules can be weighted by account store. For example, if you have connected EmpowerID to an HR system as well as Active Directory, and you want any changes made to an attribute in the HR system to take priority over changes made in Active Directory or EmpowerID (while allowing changes to be made in any system), you would give a higher score for each CRUD operation originating from the HR account store and correspondingly lower scores for the Active Directory account store.

The following flow rules are available:

  • No Sync ( Red Circle) — When this option is selected, no information flows between EmpowerID and the native system.

  • Bidirectional Flow (Bidirectional Green Arrow) — When this option is selected, changes made within EmpowerID update the native system and vice-versa. For most attributes, this is the default setting.

  • Account Store Changes Only (Left Pointing Arrow) — When this option is selected, changes can only be made in the native system and are then passed to EmpowerID.

  • EmpowerID Changes Only (Right Pointing Arrow) — When this option is selected, changes can only be made in EmpowerID and are then passed to the native system.

The following CRUD operations are available:

  • Create — This operation is used to create an attribute value for an existing attribute when the value of that attribute is null.

  • Update — This operation is used to update the value of an attribute.

  • Delete — This operation is used to delete the value of an attribute.

  1. From the Account Stores tab of the Account Stores and Systems page, search for the account store you just created and click the Account Store link for it.

  2. Click the Attribute Flow Rules tab to view the current rules for the account store. Please note that the attributes available depend on the account store.

  3. To change the flow for an attribute, click the Attribute Flow drop-down located between the Person Attribute column and the External Directory Attribute column, and select the desired flow direction from the context menu.

  4. To change the score for any of the available CRUD operations (Create, Update and Delete), enter the new score in the appropriate field. By default, scores are weighted evenly, which means that a change to an attribute originating in one connected external directory has the same authority as a change to an attribute occurring in another connected external directory.

EmpowerID only considers scores for attribute CRUD operations when multiple account stores with the same user records are connected to EmpowerID, such as would be the case if an HR System and this account store were being inventoried by EmpowerID.

 

Now that the attribute flow has been set, the next steps include configuring the account store and enabling EmpowerID to inventory it.

Step 3 – Configure account store settings

  1. On the Account Store and Resource System page, select the Account Store tab and then click the pencil icon to put the account store in edit mode.


    This opens the edit page for the AWS account store. This page allows you to specify the account proxy used to connect EmpowerID to your AWS account as well as how you want EmpowerID to handle the user information it discovers in AWS during inventory. Settings that can be edited are described in the table below the image.


     

     

  2. Edit the account store as needed and then click Save to save your changes.

Next, enable the Account Inbox permanent workflow to allow the Account Inbox to provision or join the user accounts in AWS to EmpowerID Persons as demonstrated below.

Step 4 – Enable Account Inbox Permanent Workflow

 

  1. On the navbar, expand Infrastructure Admin > EmpowerID Server and Settings and select Permanent Workflows.

  2. On the Permanent Workflows page, click the Display Name link for Account Inbox.

     

  3. On the Permanent Workflow Details page that appears, click the pencil icon to put the workflow in edit mode.

     

  4. Check Enabled.

     

  5. Click Save to save your changes.

 

Step 5 – Monitor Inventory

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