Accessing member accounts in an organization with AWS Organizations

When you create an account in your organization, in addition to the root user, AWS Organizations automatically creates an IAM role that is by default named OrganizationAccountAccessRole. You can specify a different name when you create it, however we recommend that you name it consistently across all of your accounts. AWS Organizations doesn't create any other users or roles.

To access the accounts in your organization, you must use one of the following methods:

Using the root user (Not recommended for everyday tasks)

When you create new member account in your organization, the account has no root user credentials by default. Member accounts can't sign in to their root user or perform password recovery for their root user unless account recovery is enabled.

You can centralize root access for member accounts to remove root user credentials for existing member accounts in your organization. Deleting root user credentials removes the root user password, access keys, signing certificates, and deactivates multi-factor authentication (MFA). These member accounts do not have root user credentials, can't sign in as a root user, and are prevented from recovering the root user password. New accounts you create in Organizations have no root user credentials by default.

Contact your administrator if you need to perform a task that requires root user credentials on a member account where root user credentials are not present.

To access your member account as the root user, you must go through the process for password recovery. For more information, see I forgot my root user password for my AWS account in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

If you must access a member account using the root user, follow these best practices:

For the complete list of tasks that require you to sign in as the root user, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide. For additional root user security recommendations, see Root user best practices for your AWS account in the IAM User Guide.

Using trusted access for IAM Identity Center

Use AWS IAM Identity Center and enable trusted access for IAM Identity Center with AWS Organizations. This allows users to sign in to the AWS access portal with their corporate credentials and access resources in their assigned management account or member accounts.

For more information, see Multi-account permissions in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide. For information about setting up trusted access for IAM Identity Center, see AWS IAM Identity Center and AWS Organizations.

Using the IAM role OrganizationAccountAccessRole

If you create an account by using the tools provided as part of AWS Organizations, you can access the account by using the preconfigured role named OrganizationAccountAccessRole that exists in all new accounts that you create this way. For more information, see Accessing a member account that has OrganizationAccountAccessRole with AWS Organizations.

If you invite an existing account to join your organization and the account accepts the invitation, you can then choose to create an IAM role that allows the management account to access the invited member account. This role is intended to be identical to the role automatically added to an account that is created with AWS Organizations.

To create this role, see Creating OrganizationAccountAccessRole for an invited account with AWS Organizations.

After you create the role, you can access it using the steps in Accessing a member account that has OrganizationAccountAccessRole with AWS Organizations.