AWS Control Tower is a fully managed service designed to simplify the set-up and governance of a secure, compliant, multi-account AWS environment. It is built on the premise that organizations seeking to expand their footprint on the cloud require a streamlined way to manage multiple AWS accounts and services consistently. AWS Control Tower addresses this need by providing a mechanism that automates the setup of a well-architulated environment, which is a fancy way of saying it sets up your cloud environment following best practices and guidelines provided by AWS.
The core functionality of AWS Control Tower revolves around the concept of setting up new AWS accounts and organizing them in an environment that enforces company-wide policies and compliance requirements through guardrails. These guardrails are clearly defined rules for security, operations, and compliance, which can be automatically applied across all accounts within the organization. They help ensure that every account stays within the compliance boundaries that the organization has set, providing continuous governance and keeping your AWS environments in check with your enterprise standards.
One of the key benefits of AWS Control Tower is its simplicity and automation. Traditionally, setting up a multi-account environment that is secure and compliant involves a significant amount of manual work, including the setup of logging, monitoring, and access controls, across each account. AWS Control Tower simplifies this process by automating the setup of these components using pre-configured templates based on AWS best practices. This automation not only speeds up the deployment of new accounts but also reduces the likelihood of human error, leading to a more secure and compliant infrastructure.
Another important aspect of AWS Control Tower is its dashboard, which offers a single pane of glass view into the compliance and health status of all accounts under its management. This dashboard provides rich insights into how well accounts are aligned with the established guardrails, identifies non-compliant resources, and suggests actions to remediate issues. It is an invaluable tool for IT administrators and compliance officers who need to ensure ongoing compliance and governance across the entire portfolio of AWS accounts.
Finally, AWS Control Tower facilitates organizational scalability. As businesses grow, their cloud environments become more complex. AWS Control Tower makes it easier to scale by offering an environment that can grow with your company. As new accounts are needed or as new compliance requirements emerge, AWS Control Tower can help manage this complexity, ensuring that all new and existing accounts remain aligned with the organization's governance standards.
In summary, AWS Control Tower offers a comprehensive solution for managing multiple AWS accounts, ensuring they adhere to security and compliance standards through automated guardrails, providing an easy-to-use dashboard for ongoing governance, and facilitating scalability as organizational cloud environments grow. It abstracts much of the complexity associated with setting up and managing a multi-account AWS environment, allowing businesses to focus more on their core activities while maintaining a strong and compliant cloud infrastructure.
