Control Tower—your AWS governance blueprint
AWS Control Tower serves as a streamlined governance solution that automates the setup and ongoing management and operations of your AWS accounts centralized under the same organization umbrella. Designed to enforce compliance and operational best practices, Control Tower provides a unified console for easier oversight. With its ever-evolving features, such as support for nested OUs and custom guardrails, Control Tower adapts to the unique governance needs of organizations of all sizes and complexities.
Key features
Control Tower has the following key features:
- Automated landing zone setup: It quickly sets up a well-architected multi-account environment based on AWS best practices, saving time and reducing the chance of errors.
- Blueprints: It provides a set of blueprints for setting up baseline AWS environments. These are essentially design patterns that help in configuring AWS services securely, ensuring best practices are followed from the get-go.
- Audit account and log archive accounts: Control Tower sets up these two isolated accounts for security governance when creating a new landing zone. This allows for logs protection and makes it easier to keep track of actions across your environment, aiding in both monitoring and forensic investigations.
- Guardrails: There are pre-configured rules for security, operations, and compliance that work in conjunction with Organizations and Config to provide a holistic governance approach across your AWS environment. Guardrails enforce your policies by monitoring for non-compliance and automatically triggering remediation actions. They can be either preventive or detective, and you can customize them to suit your organization’s specific needs.
- Account factory: It streamlines the process of creating and provisioning new AWS accounts, making it easier to manage multiple accounts under one organization. It uses blueprints to create accounts that are automatically compliant with your organization’s guardrails, making it easier to manage multiple accounts securely.
- Lifecycle events: Allows for automation and customization during account provisioning and other significant events. For instance, you can set up lifecycle events to automatically apply specific IAM roles and policies when a new account is created, making your governance more dynamic.