An international company needs to share data from an Amazon S3 bucket to employees who are located around the world. The company needs a secure solution to provide employees with access to the S3 buck

Creating a help desk application to generate individual Amazon S3 presigned URLs for each employee introduces significant custom development and ongoing operational overhead, making it far from the 'least operational overhead' solution.

Creating an IAM Identity Center group and assigning a permission set for S3 access is a highly secure and low-overhead method for direct S3 access via the AWS console or S3-aware applications. However, if the implicit requirement is for a traditional network file share experience (SMB/NFS) for globally distributed employees, this method may not provide the desired file system interaction, potentially leading to higher adoption or integration overhead for end-users.

Amazon S3 File Gateway provides a file interface (SMB/NFS) to Amazon S3, allowing employees to access S3 data as if it were a network file share from their local environments. This approach can simplify access for employees if they require a familiar file system protocol experience, with separate shares for uploads and downloads providing controlled access.

Configuring AWS Transfer Family SFTP endpoints with a custom identity provider integrated via Lambda introduces significant setup and management overhead, including managing the SFTP service, custom Lambda for authentication, and requiring employees to use an SFTP client, which is not the 'least operational overhead' for general data sharing.