What is AWS Control Tower?

In this essential guide, we’ll cover AWS Control Tower key benefits, how to get started, pricing, frequently asked questions, and more.

What is AWS Control Tower?

AWS Control Tower automates the setup and governance of a multi-account AWS environment. It provides a central location to manage and monitor an organization’s AWS accounts, enforcing compliance and security best practices through predefined blueprints for account setup, identity management, and federated access. This allows organizations to scale their AWS usage while automatically maintaining control structures and compliance standards.

How does AWS Control Tower Work?

AWS Control Tower automates the creation of a multi-account AWS environment, known as a Landing Zone, which aligns with AWS best practices. The Landing Zone includes two main organizational units (OUs): the Security OU, which houses the Log Archive and Audit accounts for compliance and security monitoring, and the Sandbox OU, which may be used for developmental and testing purposes. Additional OUs can be registered to accommodate different organizational needs.

Upon setting up a Landing Zone, AWS Control Tower establishes a cloud-native IAM Identity Center directory to manage user permissions and identity federation. This directory supports Single Sign-On (SSO), allowing users to operate within the designated OUs under controlled access rights.

AWS Control Tower applies mandatory preventive and detective controls across the organization. Preventive controls are designed to stop undesirable actions before they happen, while detective controls monitor and log activities to ensure ongoing compliance with set policies. This governance framework is supported by automation, leveraging AWS Config for monitoring resources and Service Control Policies (SCPs) for enforcing account-level policies.

Throughout this process, AWS Control Tower ensures that all resources are managed in accordance with established security and compliance frameworks.

Landing Zone

A Landing Zone within AWS Control Tower is a securely architected multi-account AWS environment where you enforce certain compliance and security best practices. Basically, it is the container that holds all of your organization units, accounts, users, and other resources that you want to be subject to a particular set of compliance restrictions. It automates the setup using predefined blueprints for identity management, federated access, and account structures, which include centralized logging and cross-account security audits.

Account Factory

The Account Factory standardizes and automates the provisioning of new AWS accounts. It uses a template to enforce preconfigured settings such as network setups and regional preferences, ensuring all new accounts meet organizational policies and security requirements.

Comprehensive Controls Management

Comprehensive Controls Management in AWS Control Tower allows for efficient mapping and enforcement of security, operations, and compliance policies across your AWS environment. It provides detective, preventive, and proactive controls, enabling AWS organizations to enforce policies like least privilege or data encryption across their AWS resources.

Dashboard

The AWS Control Tower Dashboard provides a centralized, real-time view of your AWS environment. It displays the current configuration and compliance status of OUs and accounts, the number of active controls, and specific details on noncompliant resources. This visibility shows you your operational health and makes it easier for administrators to manage and audit their AWS landscape.

What are the benefits of AWS Control Tower?

The benefits and use cases of AWS Control tower for AWS organizations includes:

Rapid Multi-Account Setup: Establish a well-architected multi-account environment in under 30 minutes with automated processes.
Built-in Governance: Automatically create multiple AWS accounts with integrated governance from the ground up.
Preconfigured Controls: Enforce industry best practices and compliance with standards and regulations through pre-set controls.
Integrations: More easily integrate third-party software at scale, making it easier to expand functionality and performance within your AWS environment.
Enhanced Security and Compliance: Maintain stringent security standards and compliance, including digital sovereignty, without sacrificing agility.

Overview of AWS Account Management and Configuration in AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower ensures each account is configured with the necessary resources and complies with organizational policies. When AWS Control Tower creates or enrolls an account, it deploys essential configurations such as IAM roles, AWS CloudTrail trails, and Service Catalog products. This setup is part of the Account Factory templates and is designed to integrate seamlessly with the organizational unit (OU) within the Control Tower framework.

Each AWS account within Control Tower has distinct roles. The management account launches and oversees the entire Control Tower environment, maintaining full access to all resources. It’s used for Account Factory provisioning of accounts, as well as to manage OUs and controls. The log archive account stores all AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config logs, providing a centralized repository for audit and compliance needs. Lastly, the audit account offers read-only and full-access roles for security and compliance teams, enabling audits and security operations across the accounts in the landing zone.

The services ensures resources in AWS Control Tower accounts do not conflict with its setup requirements. It checks and validates each account before incorporation into the landing zone, ensuring capabilities like AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) are enabled and the account is in good standing for resource provisioning.

How to get started with AWS Control Tower

Before diving in, it’s crucial to choose your home Region, which will be the primary AWS Region for your workloads and data storage. This selection is permanent and can significantly impact the performance and compliance of your operations.

Steps to Get Started:

Sign In: Access the AWS Management Console using your administrator credentials.
Navigate to Control Tower: Go to the AWS Control Tower console via this link:AWS Control Tower Console.
Select Home Region: Ensure you are in the correct home Region, as previously determined.
Initiate Setup: Click on ‘Set up landing zone’.
Configure Defaults: Follow the on-screen instructions, inputting necessary details such as the email addresses for your log archive and audit accounts. Accept all default configurations unless specific customizations are needed.
Launch Landing Zone: Confirm your settings and click ‘Set up landing zone’.

The setup process typically takes about 30 minutes, during which AWS Control Tower will establish the necessary resources for your landing zone. Keep in mind that AWS Control Tower uses paid AWS services like AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config, which will incur costs based on usage. For more information on how to get started and how to use AWS Control Tower, consult the AWS Documentation.

AWS Control Tower vs AWS Security Hub

AWS Control Tower and AWS Security Hub are both integral parts of the AWS management suite, designed to enhance governance and security, but they serve distinct purposes. AWS Control tower helps you automatically set up and govern AWS accounts across AWS organizations in a standard and compliant way.

AWS Security Hub

In contrast to AWS Control Tower, AWS Security Hub is a comprehensive security management service that aggregates security findings from various AWS services and supported third-party solutions. It provides a unified view of the security state of AWS resources, making it easier to check your environment against security industry standards and best practices. Security Hub collects and consolidates findings from services like Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS IAM Access Analyzer, among others, offering insights into potential vulnerabilities and guidance on how to remediate them. This service enables continuous compliance checks, automated security checks, and centralized management of security alerts, thus simplifying the process of identifying and responding to specific potential security issues across your AWS environment.

How does AWS Control Tower Pricing Work?

AWS Control Tower’s pricing model is based on the services it manages — it does not charge additional fees for its governance capabilities. Users pay for the AWS resources provisioned and managed within the Control Tower environment, such as AWS Organizations, AWS Config rules, and AWS SSO usage.

Pricing is also influenced by the specific AWS services that are enabled within the Control Tower setup, such as the number of active accounts and the volume of logs generated.

For specific examples to get an idea of your potential costs, consult the AWS pricing page.

How to optimize AWS Control Tower costs

Because Control Tower itself is free, reducing your costs depends on controlling the services and resources it manages. Some quick tips include:

#1: Rightsize Accounts and Services: Regularly review the resource usage across all accounts managed by AWS Control Tower. Rightsize instances, storage, and services to match actual needs, avoiding over-provisioning.

#2: Clean Up Unused Resources: Implement a routine process for identifying and terminating unused or idle resources, such as old snapshots, unused Elastic IPs, and outdated S3 buckets across all accounts.

#3: Leverage Reserved Instances and Savings Plans: Purchase Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for services that have steady state usage. These options provide significant cost savings over on-demand pricing models.

#4: Automate with Account Factory Templates: Customize Account Factory templates to automatically configure cost-optimization settings, such as turning off unnecessary services, setting up budget alerts, and enabling cost-effective options like auto-scaling.

#5: Monitor and Enforce Policies with Service Control Policies (SCPs): Use SCPs to enforce policies that prevent launching of high-cost resources without approval, or restrict certain regions to avoid data transfer costs. Regular monitoring and policy enforcement can prevent unexpected charges and keep costs in check.

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What is AWS Control Tower?