A company has an Amazon S3–based data lake.

AWS Lake Formation is specifically designed to simplify fine-grained access control for data lakes stored in Amazon S3. By using Lake Formation tag-based access control (LF-TBAC), administrators can define access policies once and apply them dynamically based on tags rather than managing individual IAM policies.

LF-Tags can be assigned to databases, tables, and columns in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Departments are granted permissions based on tags, ensuring that each department can access only the data it is authorized to view. This approach scales efficiently as datasets and departments grow, which is critical for data lakes ingesting millions of records daily.

Managing IAM policies per department is operationally complex and error-prone. Redshift-based access centralization limits flexibility and introduces unnecessary infrastructure. Syncing data into an RDS database adds cost, latency, and maintenance overhead.

Lake Formation provides centralized governance, auditing, and least-privilege enforcement with minimal administrative effort, making it the optimal solution.