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You can manage multiple AWS accounts with AWS Organizations or AWS Control Tower. AWS Organizations give AWS users the ability to manage multiple accounts from a central point. The AWS Control Tower gives you a pre-build multi-account framework to easily set up numerous accounts.
Multiple accounts in AWS help customers isolate resources as they provide boundaries for billing, access, and security.
How Does AWS Organization Help Manage Multiple AWS Accounts?
AWS Organizations is an AWS management service for enterprises with multiple departments or customers. It provides you with account management and consolidated billing capabilities to help you meet all business needs.
AWS Organizations has a policy-based approach to help you manage multiple AWS accounts. With AWS Organizations, you can create different groups of accounts and apply policies to them. You can manage numerous accounts without manual processes and custom scripts.
When using AWS Organizations, you can use configure a set of policies that allow you to control multiple accounts centrally. Also, you can use this feature to automate the creation of new accounts through APIs.
This feature makes the process much simpler when it comes to billing. You can set up a single payment for all accounts through consolidated billing.
AWS users who manage lots of multiple accounts like managed service providers can rely on Organizations to manage their customer’s resources. It’s highly scalable, and you can add as many organizations as possible.
Features of AWS Organizations
Here are some top features of AWS Organizations:
Consolidated Billing
Central Governance
Centralized Auditing and Security
AWS security is very critical and can get overly complicated when running multiple accounts. When using AWS Organizations, you can audit all events in your accounts using AWS CloudTrail. To avoid misconfigurations, you can use AWS Config to define your preferred criteria centrally.
Other services like IAM Access Analyzer, GuardDuty, and Firewall manager can help protect resources centrally.
AWS Control Tower
AWS Control Tower is your go-to management service if you want to onboard multiple AWS accounts easily. It’s designed to abstract other AWS services and automate the numerous resources involved when building your AWS environment.
The AWS Control Tower takes away the hustle of setting up different teams. With the AWS control tower, you can set up a landing zone, a multi-account environment for simpler migration.
AWS Control Tower uses other services such as Organizations, Service Catalog, and Config to govern the multi-account environment.
Features of the AWS Control Tower
Landing Zone
A Landing Zone is a multi-account environment based on the AWS Well-Architected best practices.
The Control Tower uses identity, access, and account structure best practices to automate the process of setting up a landing zone. A typical landing zone involves the following:
- Identity management using AWS Single Sign-On
- Enabled cross-account security audits
To manage a landing zone, you can use a set of available guardrails through a self-service console. These guardrails ensure all configurations comply with set policies.
Management Dashboard
Account Factory
The account factory is a configurable template that automates the provisioning of new accounts. Through the account factory, you can standardize how you provision new accounts, which can be through enabling self-service for builders or working with pre-approved network configurations.
What are the Benefits of Multiple AWS Accounts?
Security Control
Manage Costs
Optimizing costs can be a challenging prospect when running a large company. But when you have different accounts for the different business units, it’s easier to manage costs. You can set budgets, forecast spending, and generate reports.
If each business unit is independent, you can use the chargeback feature to distribute costs. Also, you can use the showback feature to let each business unit know their spending.
Support for Multiple Operating Models
With multiple AWS accounts, you can implement multiple IT operating models. These models may include:
- DevOps
- CloudOps
- Traditional Ops
- IT Service Management
Different accounts enable distinct operational controls and governance appropriate for each model.
Managing Multiple AWS Accounts With nOps
Having multiple accounts doesn’t have to be a headache. At nOps, we provide the ultimate management tool to help you manage costs, security controls, and governance of multiple accounts.
Schedule a demo or sign up for a free trial to get started!
