AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Root and Nested Organizational Unit Support for Customizations for AWS Control Tower

Customers often use AWS accounts as a boundary to segregate their workloads, environments, business units, compliance requirements, or any type of logical isolation that suits their business. An AWS account serves as a hard boundary by design – each account is its own logical entity with controls, limits, and guardrails. Large customers typically have many […]

Managing configuration compliance across your organization with AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup

When running your applications on AWS, the number of resources you use increases as the demand of your applications keeps growing. Eventually, keeping track of your AWS resources and the relationships between them becomes challenging from a governance perspective. AWS Config lets you more easily assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. […]

Identity Guide – Preventive controls with AWS Identity – SCPs

September 30, 2025: This post was updated to reflect that AWS Organizations now offers full IAM policy language support for service control policies (SCPs). Details of this new feature are outlined in this post. AWS Identity offers a set of features that let customers apply preventive controls to their AWS environment. This includes AWS Organizations […]

Migrate AWS Landing Zone solution to AWS Control Tower

Customers who wanted to quickly set up a secure, compliant, multi-account AWS environment had adopted AWS Landing Zone solution (ALZ). To reduce the burden of managing this ALZ, AWS has announced a managed service – AWS Control Tower (Control Tower). AWS Control Tower creates your landing zone using AWS Organizations, thereby bringing together ongoing account […]

How to fix SSH issues on EC2 Linux instances using AWS Systems Manager

In a previous blog post, we provided a walkthrough of how to fix unreachable Amazon EC2 Windows instances using the EC2Rescue for Windows tool. In this blog post, I will walk you through how to utilize EC2Rescue for Linux to fix unreachable Linux instances. This Knowledge Center Article describes how EC2Rescue for Linux can be used to […]

Share your Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards with anyone using AWS Single Sign-On

Amazon CloudWatch enables customers to collect monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, alarms, and events, thereby allowing easy workload visualization and notifications. Traditionally, operational health data access was only viewable for technical support staff, thereby making operational health opaque to a wider business audience. However, actionable and valuable business insights can […]

Extending your Control Tower Network security with Amazon Route 53 DNS Firewall

In our previous post, “Securely scale multi-account architecture with AWS Network Firewall and AWS Control Tower”, we described how AWS Network Firewall can be implemented in an AWS Control Tower environment. AWS Network Firewall provides a stateful, managed firewall with rules to filter and block network and application layer traffic coming to your applications. Centralized […]

Migrating accounts between AWS Organizations with consolidated billing to all features

Customers start their cloud journey with one AWS account, and over time they deploy many resources within it before utilizing more accounts. Prior to the launch of AWS Organizations in 2017, customers received a consolidated bill for all of these accounts. The launch of AWS Organizations meant these customers were provided with an organization that […]

Illustration of the flow of actions between accounts for the Security Hub account association handshake.

Automating AWS Security Hub Alerts with AWS Control Tower lifecycle events

Important Update: As of 23 Nov 2020 the Security Hub service was updated to support direct integration with AWS Organizations. Lifecycle events are no longer the recommended way to enable Security Hub. Please utilize Security Hub’s native integration with AWS Organizations. You can also refer to this blog, which walks through how to enable GuardDuty […]

The latest from AWS Organizations (Fall 2021)

AWS Organizations provides features that customers can utilize to manage their AWS environment across accounts. When paired with other AWS services, AWS Organizations helps you manage permissions, create and share resources, govern your environment, and centrally control your security requirements. Here’s what our team has been up to since Spring 2021. Programmatically manage alternate contacts […]