Organizations—your AWS multi-account manager – Introduction to AWS Security Services

Organizations—your AWS multi-account manager

Managing multiple AWS accounts can quickly become a complex endeavor, especially as your organization grows and diversifies its cloud resources. AWS Organizations emerges as a centralized governance and management service designed to simplify this complexity. It allows you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organizational structure managed through a master account. With Organizations, you can enforce consistent policy implementation, streamline billing, and architect your environment in a way that meets the unique needs of your business units or workloads.

Key features

Organizations has the following key features:

• Centralized management: You can manage all AWS accounts from a single master account for simplified policy application, activity monitoring, and billing.
• Hierarchical structure: Create organizational units (OUs) to group AWS accounts, mimicking the functional or business units within your organization for better resource organization and policy application. This hierarchical structure also allows for easier delegation of administrative responsibilities, enabling more efficient management.
• Service control policies (SCPs): Utilize JSON-based policies to specify allowed or denied services and actions at various organizational levels, offering granular control over AWS resources.
• Consolidated billing: Aggregate billing information of all member accounts into one master account, simplifying expense tracking and enabling volume discounts.
• Tagging policies: Categorize AWS resources across accounts and OUs using standardized tags, aiding in cost allocation and compliance tracking.
• Automated account creation: Use APIs for programmatic account creation, saving time, especially for large enterprises setting up new accounts.
• Support for Resource Access Manager (RAM): Integration with AWS RAM allows for easy sharing of resources such as subnets or license configurations across accounts.

Organization units structure

OUs in Organizations are like folders that help you categorize and manage your AWS accounts. For instance, you could have an OU for your development environment and another for production. Policies set at an OU level cascade down, meaning if you restrict an S3 bucket policy in a parent OU, all accounts in child OUs inherit that policy. This is a time-saver and ensures uniformity in policy enforcement.

Let’s say your organization has different departments, such as finance, HR, and engineering. You could create an OU for each department. If the finance department is only allowed to access billing information but not compute resources, you can set that policy at the finance OU level. This way, any new or existing AWS accounts linked to the finance OU would automatically inherit these restrictions.

The flexibility of OUs also comes in handy during organizational changes. If a project initially in the development OU moves to production, you can easily shift the corresponding AWS account from one OU to another, and it will inherit the new set of policies automatically.

In a nutshell, OUs offer a streamlined way to manage multiple AWS accounts, making it easier to enforce policies, improve security, and simplify auditing.