Amazon WorkSpaces: New Active Directory integration features

Posted on: Jul 7, 2014

We have added three new features to Amazon WorkSpaces that help improve its integration with your on-premises Active Directory.

Organizational Unit (OU) selection: You can now search for and select an Organizational Unit in your Active Directory to which WorkSpaces will be joined. Joining your WorkSpace to an Organizational Unit allows you to apply Group Policies for Amazon WorkSpaces that you launch, improving security and manageability.

User and resource domain separation: If you use separate user and resource domains in your Active Directory for your on-premises desktops, you can opt to do the same with Amazon WorkSpaces. You can now join your WorkSpaces to a resource domain you provide. This improves both security and manageability for your WorkSpaces, as you can apply Group Policies at both a domain and OU level for your WorkSpaces.

Security Group selection: You can add a security group that you create in your Amazon VPC to all the WorkSpaces that belong to your Directory. This allows you to control network access from Amazon WorkSpaces in your VPC to other resources in your Amazon VPC and on-premises network.

These features are available now via the Amazon WorkSpaces console, in all the AWS regions where Amazon WorkSpaces is available. OU and Security Group selection are available for both Cloud Directory and WorkSpaces Connect. User and Resource domain separation is only available with WorkSpaces Connect. To learn more, click here.