Accessing a member account that has OrganizationAccountAccessRole with AWS Organizations

When you create a member account using the AWS Organizations console, AWS Organizations automatically creates an IAM role named OrganizationAccountAccessRole in the account. This role has full administrative permissions in the member account. The scope of access for this role includes all principals in the management account, such that the role is configured to grant that access to the organization's management account.

You can create an identical role for an invited member account by following the steps in Creating OrganizationAccountAccessRole for an invited account with AWS Organizations.

To use this role to access the member account, you must sign in as a user from the management account that has permissions to assume the role. To configure these permissions, perform the following procedure. We recommend that you grant permissions to groups instead of users for ease of maintenance.

AWS Management Console

To grant permissions to members of an IAM group in the management account to access the role

1. Sign in to the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/ as a user with administrator permissions in the management account. This is required to delegate permissions to the IAM group whose users will access the role in the member account.

2. Start by creating the managed policy that you need later in Step 11.

   In the navigation pane, choose Policies and then choose Create policy.

3. On the Visual editor tab, choose Choose a service, type STS in the search box to filter the list, and then choose the STS option.

4. In the Actions section, type assume in the search box to filter the list, and then choose the AssumeRole option.

5. In the Resources section, choose Specific, choose Add ARNs, and then type the member account number and the name of the role that you created in the previous section (we recommended naming it OrganizationAccountAccessRole).

6. Choose Add ARNs when the dialog box displays the correct ARN.

7. (Optional) If you want to require multi-factor authentication (MFA), or restrict access to the role from a specified IP address range, then expand the Request conditions section, and select the options you want to enforce.

8. Choose Next.

9. On the Review and create page, enter a name for the new policy. For example : GrantAccessToOrganizationAccountAccessRole. You can also add an optional description.

10. Choose Create policy to save your new managed policy.

11. Now that you have the policy available, you can attach it to a group.

    In the navigation pane, choose User groups and then choose the name of the group (not the check box) whose members you want to be able to assume the role in the member account. If necessary, you can create a new group.

12. Choose the Permissions tab, choose Add permissions, and then choose Attach policies.

13. (Optional) In the Search box, you can start typing the name of your policy to filter the list until you can see the name of the policy you just created in Step 2 through Step 10. You can also filter out all of the AWS managed policies by choosing All types and then choosing Customer managed.

14. Check the box next to your policy, and then choose Attach policies.

IAM users that are members of the group now have permissions to switch to the new role in the AWS Organizations console by using the following procedure.

AWS Management Console

To switch to the role for the member account

When using the role, the user has administrator permissions in the new member account. Instruct your IAM users who are members of the group to do the following to switch to the new role.

1. From the upper-right corner of the AWS Organizations console, choose the link that contains your current sign-in name and then choose Switch Role.

2. Enter the administrator-provided account ID number and role name.

3. For Display Name, enter the text that you want to show on the navigation bar in the upper-right corner in place of your user name while you are using the role. You can optionally choose a color.

4. Choose Switch Role. Now all actions that you perform are done with the permissions granted to the role that you switched to. You no longer have the permissions associated with your original IAM user until you switch back.

5. When you finish performing actions that require the permissions of the role, you can switch back to your normal IAM user. Choose the role name in the upper-right corner (whatever you specified as the Display Name) and then choose Back to UserName.