What Are the Benefits of Using AWS Organizations?

When your business needs grow and you use AWS at the same time, there will come a time when trying to fit all of your workloads into a single AWS account will become more confusing and hard to manage. AWS Organizations help with this. What are the benefits of using AWS Organizations? Simply put, it is a service that lets customers manage and control groups of AWS accounts and the processes and policies that apply to those accounts from a single location. The service in question is a service for managing AWS accounts.

This article will give you a more detailed explanation of what AWS Organizations is and show you how to build it up yourself using the best practices in the business.

What Are AWS Organizations?

AWS Organizations is a relatively new service for managing accounts first launched in February 2017. It lets users manage multiple AWS accounts from a single place. As an organization’s administrator, it helps you meet the rules for compliance, financial responsibility, and security.

With AWS Organizations, you can grow your workloads on AWS while still keeping your environment under centralized control. Organizations can help you programmatically create new accounts and assign resources, simplify billing by setting up a single payment method for all of your accounts, create groups of accounts to organize your workflows, and apply policies to these groups for governance, whether your business is a growing startup or a large enterprise.

AWS Organizations also connect to other AWS services. This lets you set centralized configurations, security mechanisms, and resource sharing for all of the accounts in your organization.

How It Works?

AWS Organizations are the administrative separation between different AWS accounts. Only an AWS master account can make an AWS organization, which means it can fully receive the benefits of using it. From a master account, you can make other accounts. Once these accounts have been added to the organization, they are called “connected accounts”. Because of this, an organization can have both a single master account and multiple connected accounts. You can’t link the same account to more than one Organization at the same time.

Organizations can be further divided into Organization Units (OU), which hold different AWS accounts and have names like “Production” or “Development”. There can be more than one Organization Unit in an Organization. Service Control Policies (SCP) are a set of policies that can be linked to organizational units (OUs). They can be used to control access to services in different accounts. Organizations make it possible to do things like have consolidated account billing, shared IAM user databases, and policy-based service control.

As the administrator of an organization, you can create new AWS accounts, close down existing accounts, and invite other accounts to join the organization. In addition to this, it has a more flexible hierarchical structure with organizational units for your AWS accounts and resource groups (OUs). AWS Organizations is a global service that users in any AWS Region can connect to through a single endpoint. You don’t have to choose which area you want to visit.

4 Components of AWS Organizations

If you want to know everything it can do, you need to know about the parts and architecture it gives your accounts and groups. With the help of the next list, you should be able to get a clear picture of how AWS Organizations’ hierarchy works.

1. Master Account(s)

This is the main account for an AWS Organization. It has administrative access to all the accounts that belong to that AWS Organization, along with all of the benefits that come with it. The master account will help keep track of all billing and logs for all accounts in the Organization. It is also for managing all accounts.

In a general sense, this account is the one that has to pay all of the costs that the member accounts incurred. It also has to do the things that a payer account does. Logging into this AWS account is the first step in setting up your business.

If you have a master account, you can make new accounts and get rid of old ones in the different groups. One of the other benefits of these accounts is that you can manage invitations. Using a master account can help in many other ways also, particularly integrations and the implementation of policies.

2. Member Account(s)

Accounts in an AWS Organization that aren’t the Master account are called Member accounts. These can be either new accounts that have been added to the AWS Organization or accounts that already exist.

3. Organization Units (OU)

Organization Units are the units in which all accounts are put into different groups. People can make many OUs inside of an Organization, and these OUs can be put inside of each other.

You can set up a hierarchy by putting other organizational units inside one OU. Because of this, they can match the organization’s structure. You can’t add the same account to more than one organizational unit when using OU.

4. Service Control Policies (SCP)

Service Control Policies help one make different policies when working with AWS Organizations. It is a document in your Amazon Web Services account that can be used to manage permissions or rules for people or resources or to set them up. This could make it harder for users to do certain things in their AWS accounts.

As soon as they are put into action, they will affect every resource in that account. They are the best way to limit the rights or resources that people or groups have. It can also help you log in to the Root account. You can find it by going to AWS Organizations, then Policies, then Service Control Policies.

6 Features of AWS Organizations

When using AWS Organizations, you have several unique features to utilize to start getting usage benefits. For the purpose of this article, we will only talk about some of them below. 

1. Centralized Management

Users can combine all of their accounts into one organization and manage them all from one place. Users can add both new and old AWS accounts to Organizations in AWS.

2. Central Billing

Accounts that are part of an AWS Organization only need one master account to handle billing. Because of this, a lot of time and work are saved.

3. Account Grouping

Setup for accounts in AWS Organizations can be either standard or hierarchical, depending on what the user wants. Users can set up different Organization Units that have different access levels, and they can even put OUs inside of each other.

4. Policies

Users can set up policies in AWS Organizations to set limits for each account and limit what actions they can take based on what roles they have.

5. Integration

AWS Organizations can connect to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Due to that, it’s possible to assign roles to users and accounts. Integration with the other services that AWS has to offer is also possible. For example, the AWS Organization service can link up with other AWS services like the AWS backup service, CloudTrail, and so on.

6. Free-to-Use

Setting up an AWS Organization or using one doesn’t cost anything. The user will only be charged for the number of resources that each account actually uses. aw

The 7 Benefits of Using AWS Organizations

When multiple accounts are kept outside of AWS Organizations, there is a chance that they will not be managed well. AWS Organizations make it easier to keep track of the accounts and make it possible to manage and keep an eye on them all from one place. It makes sure that every account follows the firm’s compliance policy and gives you the power to control who can use which AWS services.

On the other hand, even though the consolidated billing system would charge the management account, you could get big discounts based on how much you buy, which you might not be able to do with a single account. In this section, we’ll list all of the benefits in a few different categories so that you can get a better idea of how AWS Organizations can help you get an edge over other companies in your industry.

1. Rapid Scalability

With AWS Organizations, you can quickly grow your environment by using automation to do so. Also shown are a number of accounts that have built-in security restrictions. It lets your team set up specific accounts, which you can then manage by using AWS cloud formation StackSets to manage the programmatic resources and permissions associated with those accounts.

2. Custom Environment

Another benefit of AWS Organizations is that you can make policies that give your team the resources they need while keeping them safe behind a wall you build. You can also put accounts in organizational units, and then use service control policies, which you can set up, to limit the rules for the OUs.

3. Data Management

With AWS CloudTrail, you can see all of the information about the events and actions that are happening across all of your accounts. But AWS backup lets you keep track of what needs to be backed up, and the AWS Control Tower helps you build cross-account security audits and manage rules that are applied to accounts.

With the help of Amazon GuardDuty, you will also be able to keep an eye on your resources, find potential risks, and control all of your security services from one place.

4. Access Control

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) and your company’s active directory work together to make it easier for everyone in the company to manage user-based permissions. It lets you do jobs that require the least amount of access and also lets you make permissions that are specific to each job type. In addition, it lets you control how AWS services operate by assigning service control policies to organizational units, users (user accounts), and account groups.

5. Cost Tracking

The best way for AWS enterprises to keep track of costs is through consolidated billing, a primary benefit of AWS Organizations. All of the spendings will show up on a dashboard that reveals all of the accounts. With the help of the streamlined and unified cost management system, you’ll be able to take advantage of discounts for buying in bulk while keeping only one account.

6. Upgraded Security

AWS Organizations benefits you with a specific security group. You could give them access to all of the available resources, but they could only read the information. This would help identify and resolve any security concerns. You can also give the group permission to use Amazon GuardDuty’s active monitoring and threat reduction features. In addition, the IAM Access Analyzer makes it possible to quickly identify any unintended access to your resources.

7. Resources Sharing

AWS has made it very easy to share any central resource that your organization uses across the accounts that you have within the organization. You can use AWS Resource Access Manager to make sure that resources are on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. You can also use it to make sure that everyone in your business has access to the core resource.

How to Get Started with AWS Organizations?

To start reaping the benefits of using AWS Organizations, you must first know how to begin. You need to decide which of your AWS accounts will be the management account beforehand. You can either create a brand-new AWS account or choose one already exists. The following steps offer something concrete to follow.

1. Log in as an administrator to the AWS Management Console using the AWS account you plan to use to run your business.

2. Go to the AWS console for Organizations.

3. Choose the option Create Organization.

4. Choose the features that you want users in your organization to be able to use. Either all of the features or consolidated billing-only features. If you want to use all of the central management features that AWS Organizations has to offer, you should make sure to select all of the features.

5. You can add AWS accounts to your business using either of the following two methods: Invite users who already have an Amazon Web Services account to join your company by using their AWS account ID or the email address associated with their account; Create new Amazon Web Services accounts.

6. By putting your AWS accounts into OUs, you can model the setup of your organization.

7. Create policies for organizational units (OUs), accounts, or the organization as a whole, such as those for service control or backup (only available for all-feature organizations).

8. Turn on Amazon Web Services services that are already connected to AWS Organizations.

You can also use the AWS Command Line Interface (for access via the command line) or SDKs to build a new organization by following these steps.

Conclusion

To sum up, AWS Organizations is a great feature that lets AWS customers put all of their accounts in one place. It is easier to use it and manage the different accounts and their fees from one place than to do each of these things separately. Users can save a lot of time and effort by using this feature to manage their many accounts. At first, it might feel a little complicated to use, but as the user gets better at it, they’ll find that it saves them a lot of time, effort, and money.

If you are an AWS Partner and have questions about the benefits of AWS Organizations or about AWS in general, don’t be afraid to get in touch with 1Byte. We have cloud experts on staff who are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to help you with any technological task.