Cloud Providers IAM Comparison

Why Native Tools Still Leave Organizations Exposed

When it comes to securing identities and managing access across cloud infrastructure, the built-in IAM tools from AWS, Microsoft Entra ID (Azure), and Google Workspace are solid, but let’s not pretend they’re enough on their own. They’re powerful, yes. But they’re also siloed, complex, and limited when it comes to real-world usage at scale, especially when an environment spans more than one cloud provider. 

The Cloud Multiverse

So, here’s our minimal-fluff, gloves-off cloud providers IAM comparison, and how we at Trustle can clean up the spaghetti.

AWS IAM gives organizations granular control, right down to individual API actions. It’s fine-tuned for DevOps-heavy teams and infrastructure-first organizations, with JSON policies, users, roles, groups, and service-linked identities for days. It’s also famously unforgiving. Misconfigure a trust policy, and you’ve either bricked access or left the door swinging wide open for attackers. While AWS does allow for temporary credentials using IAM roles and STS, it doesn’t offer native just-in-time access or unified visibility across accounts. 

There’s also IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO), which attempts to simplify user access across AWS accounts and business applications by centralizing identity management and permission sets. It supports integration with external identity providers (like Okta or Entra ID) and allows admins to assign access to users or groups across multiple AWS accounts from a single place. While it’s an ok usability upgrade over raw IAM, it’s still confined to the AWS ecosystem. It lacks any advanced automation, analytics, or dynamic just-in-time capabilities, such as provisioning and automated deprovisioning. In addition, it has very little risk-based access intelligence and zero cross-cloud visibility.

If organizations want automation or privileged access management, prepare to duct-tape third-party tools or wrangle up their own.

Microsoft Entra ID takes a more enterprise-y approach. Deep integration with Microsoft 365, strong Conditional Access capabilities, and Privileged Identity Management (PIM) make it a natural fit for orgs already neck-deep in Azure. The RBAC model is clean, but the configuration overhead isn’t. JIT access is native here, but managing it well takes patience (and usually a small battalion). The lifecycle of Entra permissions management is arguably best-in-class, especially with HR integration and SCIM support, but ask anyone who’s spent their week trying to clean up ungoverned guest accounts, and you’ll hear a different story.

It’s powerful, but in that “more knobs than you’ll ever need” kind of way.

Google Workspace and Google Cloud IAM. It’s simple, clean, and focused on usability. Businesses get project-level permissions, policy bindings, and IAM roles, all wrapped in a UI that’s far more beginner-friendly than its rivals. But that simplicity comes at a cost. In Workspace there’s no native support for JIT access, though with Google Cloud IAM (within GCP) you do get more support (PAM & IAM conditions), though not entirely out-of-the-box. Conditional access is basic at best. And while Google’s BeyondCorp Zero Trust framework shows promise, they’re still doing a lot of the heavy lifting themselves, or dragging in additional tools to fill the gaps. 

In a cloud providers' IAM comparison, Google often wins on ease-of-use, but loses steam fast when organizations need more than the basics.

Cloud IAM Comparison: AWS vs. Azure (Microsoft Entra ID) vs. Google Workspace

Alas, none of these cloud-native IAM tools are designed to work together. They weren’t built for the messy reality of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud security, where identities sprawl across AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS platforms. They all speak different languages, follow different standards, and treat roles, users, and policies like they’re living in separate realities. That’s where Trustle flips the script.

‍Essential Extras

Trustle acts as a unifying layer across providers, consolidating roles, policies, accounts, and identities into a single, auditable source of truth. It doesn’t replace AWS IAM, Microsoft Entra, or Google IAM. It makes them play nicely together. Think of it like adding a smart access layer on top of a scattered identity infrastructure. A single pane of glass where users can actually see what’s going on, fix what’s risky, and automate access decisions without losing their mind.

Take just-in-time access, for example. Trustle builds seamless request-approve-revoke flows using Slack or Teams. Someone requests access. A manager approves. Access is granted for a defined window. When it’s over, it’s gone. Zero standing privileges. No one’s left holding a ticking time bomb of permanent admin rights. Cloud providers may claim to offer this, and some partially do, but not with this level of fluidity or cross-cloud coordination.

Trustle isn’t just another alert fatigue generator; it surfaces the riskiest accounts: dormant users, overprivileged service account security, and unrotated keys, across all connected platforms. It quantifies exposure and recommends actions in plain English. AWS IAM won’t tell an organization if a former contractor still has S3 access. Azure won’t warn them that guest accounts have ballooned to triple the organization's actual workforce. Trustle will, and it’ll let IT and/or security kill that access before it becomes headline material.

Trustle also handles identity lifecycle management across platforms. Whether businesses are syncing from Okta, detecting orphaned accounts in AWS, or identifying stale service credentials in GCP, Trustle finds the bloat and trims it away. No more Excel exports and late-night Slack messages asking, “Does anyone know who this user is?” The system tracks access requests, who approved them, and what policies were applied, offering a unified audit trail that’s actually useful when something goes wrong.

Cloud IAM + Trustle Comparison

Disconnected Cloud IAM Tools

The Cloud IAM Comparison demonstrates a universe of specialized but disconnected tools. AWS gives businesses precision but expects organizations to code their own security policies. Azure offers power and integration, but demands patience and experience to configure safely. Google makes it easy to get started, but struggles with advanced governance at scale. And none of them are designed to help organizations navigate the full identity lifecycle across a multi-cloud estate.

Trustle wasn’t built to compete with these IAM tools. It was built to complement and complete them, provinding best possible cloud infrastructure entitlement management. It fills the space where cloud-native tools stop short, in governance, unification, auditability, and risk reduction. It’s the connective tissue that lets organizations move toward Zero Trust without juggling fifteen dashboards and praying that their logs are complete when the auditors show up.

In a time of growing complexity and exploding identity surfaces, stitching together a coherent, risk-aware, auditable access model is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s essential. And as this cloud providers' IAM comparison makes clear, the native tools alone aren’t going to cut it.

Trustle is the difference between hoping an organization's access model works and knowing it does.

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