With organizations shifting to a multi-account architecture, employees often struggle to manage these accounts. IT teams must manually create and configure new accounts without centralized account management. This is where the Control Tower comes in. It helps organizations automate the creation and governance of user accounts.
Read the article below to learn more about this service and how it helps organizations manage AWS accounts.
AWS Control Tower
AWS Control Tower is a centralized management service offered by AWS that automates the creation and governance of AWS multi-account architecture for each new account, followed by best practices for operations, security, and compliance.
Moreover, Control Tower organizes the abilities of various AWS services, such as AWS Service Catalog, Organizations, and IAM Identity Center, to create a landing zone as early as possible. It creates and manages these resources.
While hosting a collection of accounts, you might need an orchestration layer that benefits account deployment and account governance. AWS Control Tower is that layer that provides you with the simplest way to set up and govern a secure and compliant multi-account architecture. With Control Tower, you can enable adherence to corporate standards, meet compliance requirements, and follow best security and compliance practices.
Features
AWS Control Tower features include
Landing Zone
A landing zone is the main feature of the Control Tower, which is a well-architectured environment for managing multiple accounts. It features the best security and compliance practices and contains all the organizational units (OUs), users, accounts, and resources in your environment.
Controls
Also known as a guardrail, a control is a rule or policy that enables the administration of your AWS environment. The three types of controls include preventive, detective, and proactive.
Account Factory
It is a template for accounts that can be configured to help ease new accounts provisioning by providing pre-authorized account configurations. It facilitates the automation of the account provisioning process in your enterprise.
Dashboard
It provides the administrators continuous visibility into your landing zone so they can see provisioned accounts, controls, and non-compliant resources.
AWS Control Tower – Working
AWS Control Tower relies on the concepts of landing zones, a well-architectured multi-account environment for all your AWS resources. This environment can be used to enforce compliance regulations on all these resources. The structure of a landing zone is given below.
- Root: It is the parent consisting of all other OUs in your landing zone.
- Security OU: It contains the Audit accounts and Log Archive, also known as shared accounts. Launching a landing zone allows you to customize the name for these shared accounts. You can shift your existing AWS accounts into Control Tower for added security and logging.
- Sandbox OU: This is created on the launching of the landing zone. Sandbox OU and other OUs consist of users' enrolled accounts while working to perform their AWS workloads.
- IAM Identity Center Directory: It provides space to users of the IAM identity Center.
- IAM Identity Center Users: These identities are taken by your users to perform AWS workloads in your landing zone.
After setting up a landing zone, AWS Control Tower will automate the execution of the following tasks.
- Creation of two AWS Organizations organization units (OUs).
- Creation and addition of a Log Archive account and Audit account in the Security OU.
- Creation of a cloud-native directory in the IAM Identity Center.
- It enables all mandatory, preventive, and detective controls to enforce policies and detect configuration violations.
How to Use it?
If you're new to AWS, you can begin by creating your AWS account and setting up MFA. Otherwise, you can customize your AWS Control Tower environment straight away. In case you already have an AWS account, skip to step 2.
If you're a new user in AWS, do the following.
Step 1; Sign up for AWS
While signing up for AWS, your account is set to sign in for all AWS services, including the Control Tower. To create an AWS account, follow these steps.
- Open the AWS signup portal.
- Follow the instructions and create a new account in AWS.
- The next thing you should do is enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your account.
Step 2; Configure & Launch Landing Zone:
AWS Control Tower helps you create an automated landing zone with easy steps. Administrators can launch a landing zone with a single click from the AWS Control Tower console once they have chosen their desired home Region for AWS Control Tower.
Once you have set your landing zone, you can use it based on your requirements. For instance, you can set up IAM Identity Center users and groups to provide people with specific permissions and roles. Learn more about its usage here.
Reasons for Using Control Tower
AWS Control Towers help simplify the management of the multi-account environment for administrators while maintaining security and compliance requirements.
You can use AWS Control Tower for the following reasons.
Quick App Deployment
Control Tower provides a solution to set up and govern your AWS multi-account architecture, enabling you to deploy applications quickly.
Provisioning of Compliant AWS Accounts
It automates the provisioning process for your AWS accounts to help you meet security and compliance requirements.
Deployment of Data Residency Controls
The guardrails with added purpose-built controls disallow you to create, store, and process data and resources outside particular AWS regions.
Increased Agility Without Compromising Security
The service enables you to govern new and existing accounts, and their configurations to provide visibility into the compliance status and employ controls based on the status at scale.
Flexible Security & Compliance
You can use the account construct to isolate workloads with varying security and compliance requirements, thus easing the management of security and compliance in a multi-cloud environment.
Final Words
AWS Control Tower enables easy management of your multi-account environment. It helps you maintain independence on the platform while ensuring each AWS account meets the enterprise-established policies. Also, the service is highly scalable. You can expand your AWS Control Tower environment by simply working in AWS Organizations and the AWS Control Tower console.
