AWS Control Tower is a fully managed service that makes it easy to set up and govern a multi-account AWS environment. It automates the process of setting up a secure, compliant multi-account environment based on best practices established by AWS., with the ability to centrally manage policies, auditing, and compliance.
However, as organizations have unique requirements and use cases, Control Tower also allows for customizations that can help further adapt the service to their specific needs. In this blog post, we will dive deep into the features and benefits of using AWS Control Tower, as well as walk through examples of how it can be customized to meet the specific needs of your organization.
First, let’s start by reviewing the key features of AWS Control Tower:
- Multi-account management: Control Tower allows you to easily set up and manage multiple AWS accounts within a single organization, providing you a centralized view of all accounts, resources, and configurations.
- Governance: Control Tower provides built-in guardrails to help you establish and enforce policies for security, operations, and compliance across all accounts, ensuring consistency and best practices.
- Auditing: Control Tower allows you to collect and analyze log data from multiple accounts and services, providing you with a centralized view of activity across all accounts, for security and compliance purposes.
- Compliance: Control Tower includes built-in checks for compliance with industry standards, such as PCI DSS and SOC 2, making it easy for you to ensure that your environment is compliant with these standards.
Now, let’s explore some of the customizations available in Control Tower:
- Customizable landing zones: Control Tower allows you to create custom landing zones, which are preconfigured sets of AWS accounts, organizational units (OUs), and resources that can be easily deployed in your organization. These custom landing zones can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your organization, such as adding or removing resources, or configuring different settings.
- Customizable guardrails: The built-in guardrails provided by Control Tower are a set of predefined rules and policies that help you to adhere to best practices and compliance. However, you can also create your own custom guardrails to meet your unique needs and requirements.
- Customizable compliance checks: Control Tower includes built-in checks for compliance with industry standards, such as PCI DSS and SOC 2, however, you can also create custom compliance checks for your organization’s specific needs.
- Customizable Event Feed: Control Tower provides a centralized event feed that allows you to view and respond to security and compliance events from multiple accounts and services. You can also create custom feeds to monitor specific events or resources that are relevant to your organization.
Here are some useful links for further reading
- https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-control-tower-automate-account-creation
- https://github.com/aws-solutions/aws-control-tower-customizations
- https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/aws/aws-control-tower-aft
