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CLOUD SERVICE · AWS

AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower is a cloud service that automatically sets up and governs a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices established through AWS’s experience working with thousands of enterprises.

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What is AWS Control Tower

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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.

Key AWS Control Tower Features

AWS Control Tower simplifies the setup and governance of a secure, compliant, multi-account AWS environment with features like automated landing zone setup, centralized policy management, continuous compliance monitoring, an integrated Account Factory, customizable guardrails, and a centralized dashboard for insights.

Automated Landing Zone Setup

AWS Control Tower automates the setup of a multi-account AWS environment, known as a landing zone, which includes best practice blueprints for secure and efficient cloud operations.

Centralized Policy Management

Offers centralized governance with policy management that enables consistent security and compliance controls across all accounts in the AWS environment.

Continuous Compliance

Automatically monitors compliance with policies and provides detailed reports to help ensure that resource configurations align with AWS best practices and organizational policies.

Integrated Account Factory

Provides an Account Factory feature for provisioning and configuring new AWS accounts in alignment with the organization’s landing zone settings and policies.

Customizable Guardrails

Enables the implementation of preventive and detective guardrails to ensure accounts stay within compliance and operational policies, managing risks without sacrificing agility.

Dashboard and Insights

Offers a centralized dashboard that delivers insights into accounts' and resources' compliance status, making it easier to audit and manage cloud environments.

AWS Control Tower Use Cases

AWS Control Tower use cases include automated multi-account setup, centralized policy management, streamlined compliance auditing, and simplified account provisioning and management, providing a comprehensive solution for managing governance, compliance, and operations across AWS accounts.

Automated Multi-account Setup

AWS Control Tower automates the setup of a multi-account AWS environment following AWS best practices. It enables organizations to quickly set up new accounts and organizational units with standardized governance controls, making it easier to manage access, security, and compliance across accounts.

Centralized Policy Management

With AWS Control Tower, companies can centrally manage governance policies across all their AWS accounts. This includes implementing service control policies (SCPs) to ensure compliance with internal standards and regulations by enforcing permission guardrails on what actions users and resources can perform.

Streamlined Compliance Auditing

AWS Control Tower simplifies compliance auditing by providing a dashboard that consolidates compliance status across all accounts. It automatically logs and monitors activities in all accounts for audit purposes, helping organizations ensure continuous compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and others.

Simplified Account Provisioning and Management

Organizations can utilize AWS Control Tower to simplify the process of account provisioning and management. It provides account lifecycle management features that enable businesses to efficiently manage the creation, setup, and governance of multiple AWS accounts from a single interface.

AWS Control Tower pricing models

AWS Control Tower adopts a usage-based pricing model with no additional costs for the service itself, but charges apply for the use of AWS services configured by Control Tower, based on each service's consumption and pricing.

Additional Costs for Configured AWS Services

Beyond the baseline functionality of AWS Control Tower, any extra AWS services activated or managed through the Control Tower dashboard incurs additional costs. This includes services like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, and AWS Lambda, where the pricing would depend on the consumption and configuration of these services according to their individual pricing models.

Usage-based Pricing

AWS Control Tower follows a usage-based pricing model where costs are incurred based on the resources and services used within your accounts spanning multiple AWS services. There are no upfront fees or mandatory service costs for AWS Control Tower itself, but you pay for AWS services configured by Control Tower such as AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, and others based on their respective usage rates.

Services AWS Control Tower integrates with

AWS Organizations image AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations helps you centrally manage and govern your environment as you grow and scale your AWS resources. It enables you to create accounts, organize them into organizational units, and apply policies for governance.