Amazon S3 just got a powerful security enhancement — you can now view a global summary of all external access policies across your S3 buckets directly in the S3 Console. This lets you quickly identify public access or cross-account access without digging through every bucket policy in every AWS Region. 🙌
📊 What’s New?
- View external access summary for all your buckets
- Identify buckets with public access or cross-account permissions
- Powered by AWS IAM Access Analyzer
- Available in all AWS regions
- Comes at no extra cost
🛠️ Why It Matters
Traditionally, checking external access meant:
- Going bucket-by-bucket
- Region-by-region
- Manually reviewing each policy or ACL
Now, with this consolidated summary, you can:
✅ Quickly detect misconfigurations
✅ Improve S3 security posture
✅ Audit access with minimal effort
✅ How to Enable It
Before you see this feature in action, do the following:
Grant Required Permissions
- Your IAM user/role must have permissions for access-analyzer:ListAnalyzers, access-analyzer:GetFinding, etc.
- Full list: IAM Access Analyzer Permission
Create an Account-Level Analyzer
- Go to IAM → Access Analyzer
- Create a new analyzer with the account as the "zone of trust"
- You must do this per region where you want to analyze access
Once set up, go to the S3 Console, and under "External Access Summary", you'll find a bird’s-eye view of bucket access!
🔍 Real-World Example
Let's say you have:
- 50+ S3 buckets across 7 regions
- A few buckets allow 3rd-party app integrations
- One misconfigured bucket was accidentally set to public-read
With this feature:
➡️ No more guessing or region-hopping
➡️ See which buckets have external access — at a glance
➡️ Take quick action to secure them
🧠 Final Thoughts
This is a big win for cloud security and visibility 🔒. It simplifies the detection of risky access and brings centralized awareness to all S3 buckets across your AWS account.
Try it now via the S3 Console
💬 Are you using IAM Access Analyzer already? What are your thoughts on this feature?