To centrally manage GCP IAM permissions based on Active Directory group membership, what should your team do?

The optimal approach for centrally managing Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions based on Active Directory (AD) group membership is to set up Cloud Directory Sync to synchronize groups. Cloud Directory Sync automatically synchronizes user and group information from your on-premises Active Directory into your Google Cloud environment. This means that when there are changes in group memberships within the AD, those changes are reflected in GCP without requiring manual intervention.

By leveraging Cloud Directory Sync, your team can maintain a streamlined and efficient access management process. It allows you to assign permissions to groups rather than individual users, which simplifies management, ensures consistency, and reduces the risk of human error when managing IAM policies.

In contrast, relying solely on IAM roles for individual users would complicate management and lead to a potential security risk due to inconsistent permissions across users. Creating a separate Google Group for each AD group could become unmanageable and doesn't automatically reflect the changes made in AD. Manually assigning permissions to all users is inefficient, prone to errors, and does not scale well, particularly in larger organizations with a dynamic user base. Thus, setting up Cloud Directory Sync provides a more scalable and efficient solution to manage IAM permissions based on AD group memberships.