As businesses scale their cloud environments, managing multiple AWS accounts can become increasingly complex. AWS Control Tower provides a centralized solution for governance, security, and compliance across multi-account environments. However, to fully optimize its capabilities, integrating AWS Control Tower with services like AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can greatly enhance cloud management. This blog explores how these integrations streamline multi-account management, improve security, and boost operational efficiency.
AWS Organizations – Structuring Accounts Efficiently
AWS Organizations is fundamental for managing multiple AWS accounts. AWS Control Tower uses AWS Organizations to group and manage these accounts within an organizational unit (OU).
Integration Benefits
- Centralized Account Management: AWS Control Tower uses AWS Organizations to organize accounts into OUs, enabling consistent application of policies and security guardrails across different teams or departments.
- Automated Account Provisioning: Through integration, businesses can automate the creation and management of new accounts, with security and compliance configurations applied by default.
- Account Isolation: Different accounts within an OU can be isolated based on their roles or environments (e.g., production or development), providing a layer of security.
Key Use Case
An organization can set up OUs for development, testing, and production environments, with security policies applied uniformly across these accounts using Control Tower and AWS Organizations.
AWS Service Catalog – Governing Cloud Resources with Control Tower
AWS Service Catalog enables organizations to create and manage a catalog of approved AWS services. Integrating it with AWS Control Tower ensures that teams only deploy compliant resources across their environments.
Integration Benefits
- Standardized Resource Deployment: Administrators can define and publish portfolios of approved services and configurations for deployment.
- User-Friendly Resource Access: Teams can self-service approved resources from AWS Service Catalog, within the governance limits set by AWS Control Tower.
- Automated Compliance: This integration enforces governance and cost-efficiency guidelines, preventing the deployment of unapproved or misconfigured services.
Key Use Case
For instance, a company’s development team can only launch pre-approved EC2 instances, ensuring cost and compliance standards are met while giving teams the flexibility to manage their resources independently.
AWS IAM – Securing User Access and Permissions
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is critical for controlling access across AWS environments. AWS Control Tower’s integration with IAM simplifies centralized access management.
Integration Benefits
- Centralized Role-Based Access Control: AWS Control Tower uses IAM to provide role-based access across multiple AWS accounts, ensuring users have appropriate access to resources.
- Single Sign-On (SSO): AWS Control Tower supports SSO, enabling users to log in to multiple AWS accounts with one set of credentials while managing access levels through IAM.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Control Tower can enforce MFA for enhanced security, ensuring users across all accounts have an additional layer of protection when accessing AWS services.
Key Use Case
In an enterprise with hundreds of users, AWS Control Tower, IAM, and SSO can unify access management, ensuring users only have the necessary permissions, following the principle of least privilege.
Guardrails and Service Control Policies (SCPs) – Enforcing Policies
Guardrails are a key feature of AWS Control Tower, providing pre-configured rules to enforce security, compliance, and best practices across accounts. These guardrails are powered by Service Control Policies (SCPs), part of AWS Organizations.
Integration Benefits
- Enforcing Compliance: SCPs allow administrators to enforce specific policies across all accounts, such as ensuring that no EC2 instances are launched in restricted regions.
- Blocking Non-Compliant Actions: Mandatory guardrails prevent actions that could violate best practices, such as disabling logging or bypassing security groups.
- Custom Guardrails: Organizations can create custom guardrails that align with their internal policies while still adhering to AWS best practices.
Key Use Case
A financial institution could use SCPs to enforce data residency requirements, ensuring that sensitive information is stored only in specific AWS regions. AWS Control Tower ensures these rules are consistently applied across accounts.
AWS Control Tower and CloudFormation – Automating Infrastructure Deployment
AWS Control Tower integrates with AWS CloudFormation to enable infrastructure as code (IaC), automating the setup and management of resources across accounts while embedding security and governance policies into the infrastructure.
Integration Benefits
- Automated Account Setup: CloudFormation templates can automatically configure new accounts within AWS Control Tower, ensuring they adhere to predefined security and governance policies.
- Consistent Deployment: Using CloudFormation with Control Tower ensures a consistent infrastructure setup across all accounts, aligned with company policies.
- Streamlined Updates: When changes are needed, CloudFormation can update infrastructure across accounts, ensuring all environments remain in sync with organizational standards.
Key Use Case
A growing organization can use CloudFormation to automate the creation of VPCs, IAM roles, and other critical resources. AWS Control Tower ensures these deployments adhere to security policies right from the start.
Conclusion
Integrating AWS Control Tower with services like AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog, IAM, and CloudFormation creates a comprehensive and efficient multi-account management system. These integrations allow businesses to automate security, enforce compliance, and optimize cloud resource deployment at scale. Whether it’s provisioning accounts, managing user access, or enforcing policies, these integrations ensure that your AWS environment remains secure, compliant, and operationally efficient.
At 9acts, we specialize in helping businesses streamline their AWS environments with solutions like AWS Control Tower. we optimize your multi-account AWS environment for improved governance and performance.
