G2

Koh W.

Solution Engineer - Data & AI

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/15/2026

"Clean Resource Hierarchy and IAM Recommender Make Access Management Easy"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)?

What I like most about Google Cloud IAM is the clean, intuitive simplicity of its resource hierarchy. Unlike other cloud providers where permissions can quickly turn into a tangled web, Google’s model of Organizations, Folders, and Projects makes it much easier to manage access at scale. I especially like that I can define a high-level policy at the Folder level—for example, for a “Production” environment—and then have those permissions automatically and consistently inherited by every project underneath it. This inheritance model saves me a huge amount of manual configuration and helps reduce the chance of human error.

I also find the AI-driven IAM Recommender to be a real boost to my security posture. It’s reassuring to have something that proactively reviews my actual usage patterns and flags opportunities to remove over-privileged access. Instead of guessing whether a service account has more permissions than it needs, I can rely on clear guidance on how to reach least privilege without breaking my applications. That kind of proactive support makes it feel like I have a security expert keeping an eye on things, helping me keep my environment both lean and secure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)?

One of my biggest frustrations is how complex it is to manage Custom Roles when the predefined roles don’t quite fit. Google offers hundreds of predefined roles, but they’re often either too broad or missing one specific permission I need. When I have to create a custom role, I’m forced to sift through thousands of granular permissions (for example, compute.instances.get vs compute.instances.list), which quickly becomes dizzying and time-consuming. If I miss even one small permission, an entire deployment can fail with a cryptic error message that isn’t always straightforward to debug.

I also dislike how troubleshooting permission issues can feel like a “black box.” Even with the Policy Troubleshooter, I still run into cases where a “Permission Denied” error pops up and it takes far too long to figure out whether the root cause is an IAM policy, an Organization Policy constraint, or a service-specific firewall rule. And while the policy management interface looks clean, it can feel sluggish in large organizations with thousands of service accounts and members, which makes searching and filtering more cumbersome than it should be. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) solving and how is that benefiting you?

Google Cloud IAM tackles the fundamental problem of “credential sprawl” and the resulting risk of unauthorized access. In a complex cloud environment, the old approach of relying on long-lived API keys was a security nightmare waiting to happen. IAM improves this by using Service Accounts and Workload Identity Federation, which lets me grant short-lived, identity-based access to both humans and machines. The practical benefit for me is a much smaller “blast radius” if something leaks: even if a temporary token is intercepted, it expires quickly and is limited to a very specific slice of my infrastructure.

It also helps with the ongoing challenge of staying compliant in a regulated industry. Before IAM, proving “who has access to what” for an audit was a manual, week-long headache. Now I get a centralized audit trail through Cloud Audit Logs that shows every permission change and access request in real time. This cuts down the compliance “busy work” dramatically; I can generate a report in minutes to demonstrate that we’re following the principle of least privilege, which gives me peace of mind and more time to focus on building features rather than managing bouncers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.