What is AWS organizations used for?

Administrative Actions in Organizations

• Create an AWS account and add it to your organization, or add an existing AWS account to your organization.
• Organize your AWS accounts into groups called organizational units (OUs).
• Organize your OUs into a hierarchy that reflects your company’s structure.
• Centrally manage and attach policies to the entire organization, OUs, or individual AWS accounts.

Concepts

• An organization is a collection of AWS accounts that you can organize into a hierarchy and manage centrally.
• A management account is the AWS account you use to create your organization. You cannot change which account in your organization is the management account.
  • From the management account, you can create other accounts in your organization, invite and manage invitations for other accounts to join your organization, and remove accounts from your organization.
  • You can also attach policies to entities such as administrative roots, organizational units (OUs), or accounts within your organization.
  • The management account has the role of a payer account and is responsible for paying all charges accrued by the accounts in its organization.
• A member account is an AWS account, other than the management account, that is part of an organization. A member account can belong to only one organization at a time. The management account has the responsibilities of a payer account and is responsible for paying all charges that are accrued by the member accounts.
• An administrative root is the starting point for organizing your AWS accounts. The administrative root is the top-most container in your organization’s hierarchy. Under this root, you can create OUs to logically group your accounts and organize these OUs into a hierarchy that best matches your business needs.
• An organizational unit (OU) is a group of AWS accounts within an organization. An OU can also contain other OUs enabling you to create a hierarchy.
• A policy is a “document” with one or more statements that define the controls that you want to apply to a group of AWS accounts.
  • Service control policy (SCP) is a policy that specifies the services and actions that users and roles can use in the accounts that the SCP affects. SCPs are similar to IAM permission policies except that they don’t grant any permissions. Instead, SCPs are filters that allow only the specified services and actions to be used in affected accounts.

• AWS Organizations has two available feature sets:
  • All organizations support consolidated billing, which provides basic management tools that you can use to centrally manage the accounts in your organization.
  • If you enable all features, you continue to get all the consolidated billing features plus a set of advanced features such as service control policies.

• You can remove an AWS account from an organization and make it into a standalone account.
• Organization Hierarchy
  • Including root and AWS accounts created in the lowest OUs, your hierarchy can be five levels deep.
  • Policies inherited through hierarchical connections in an organization.
  • Policies can be assigned at different points in the hierarchy.
• You can attach tags, or user-defined attributes, to Organizational Units, the organization’s root, and policies. These tags let you implement attribute-based access control (ABAC). ABAC is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on tags attached to users and AWS resources.

Pricing

• This service is free.

Managing Multi-Account AWS Environments Using AWS Organizations:

Note: If you are studying for the AWS Certified Security Specialty exam, we highly recommend that you take our AWS Certified Security – Specialty Practice Exams and read our Security Specialty exam study guide.

Validate Your Knowledge

Question 1

A company requires corporate IT governance and cost oversight of all of its AWS resources across its divisions around the world. Their corporate divisions want to maintain administrative control of the discrete AWS resources they consume and ensure that those resources are separate from other divisions.

Which of the following options will support the autonomy of each corporate division while enabling the corporate IT to maintain governance and cost oversight? (Select TWO.)

1. Use AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor
2. Enable IAM cross-account access for all corporate IT administrators in each child account.
3. Create separate VPCs for each division within the corporate IT AWS account. Launch an AWS Transit Gateway with equal-cost multipath routing  (ECMP) and VPN tunnels for intra-VPC communication.
4. Use AWS Consolidated Billing by creating AWS Organizations to link the divisions’ accounts to a parent corporate account.
5. Create separate Availability Zones for each division within the corporate IT AWS account. Improve communication between the two AZs using the AWS Global Accelerator.

Show me the answer!

Correct Answers: 2,4

You can use an IAM role to delegate access to resources that are in different AWS accounts that you own. You share resources in one account with users in a different account. By setting up cross-account access in this way, you don’t need to create individual IAM users in each account. In addition, users don’t have to sign out of one account and sign into another in order to access resources that are in different AWS accounts.

You can use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to consolidate payment for multiple AWS accounts or multiple AISPL accounts. With consolidated billing, you can see a combined view of AWS charges incurred by all of your accounts. You can also get a cost report for each member account that is associated with your master account. Consolidated billing is offered at no additional charge. AWS and AISPL accounts can’t be consolidated together.

The combined use of IAM and Consolidated Billing will support the autonomy of each corporate division while enabling corporate IT to maintain governance and cost oversight. Hence, the correct choices are:

– Enable IAM cross-account access for all corporate IT administrators in each child account

 – Use AWS Consolidated Billing by creating AWS Organizations to link the divisions’ accounts to a parent corporate account

Using AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor is incorrect. Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides you real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. It only provides you alerts on areas where you do not adhere to best practices and tells you how to improve them. It does not assist in maintaining governance over your AWS accounts. Additionally, the AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor simply allows you to add, edit, and delete tags to multiple AWS resources at once for easier identification and monitoring.

Creating separate VPCs for each division within the corporate IT AWS account. Launch an AWS Transit Gateway with equal-cost multipath routing  (ECMP) and VPN tunnels for intra-VPC communication is incorrect because creating separate VPCs would not separate the divisions from each other since they will still be operating under the same account and therefore contribute to the same billing each month. AWS Transit Gateway connects VPCs and on-premises networks through a central hub and acts as a cloud router where each new connection is only made once. For this particular scenario, it is suitable to use AWS Organizations instead of setting up an AWS Transit Gateway since the objective is for maintaining administrative control of the AWS resources and not for network connectivity.

Creating separate Availability Zones for each division within the corporate IT AWS account. Improve communication between the two AZs using the AWS Global Accelerator is incorrect because you do not need to create Availability Zones. They are already provided for you by AWS right from the start, and not all services support multiple AZ deployments. In addition, having separate Availability Zones in your VPC does not meet the requirement of supporting the autonomy of each corporate division. The AWS Global Accelerator is a service that uses the AWS global network to optimize the network path from your users to your applications and not between your Availability Zones.

References:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/consolidated-billing.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/tutorial_cross-account-with-roles.html

Note: This question was extracted from our AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams.

Question 2

A multinational manufacturing company has multiple AWS accounts in multiple AWS regions across North America, Europe, and Asia. The solutions architect has been tasked to set up AWS Organizations to centrally manage policies and have full administrative control across the multiple AWS accounts owned by the company, without requiring custom scripts and manual processes.

Which of the following options is the recommended implementation to achieve this requirement with the LEAST effort?

1. Set up AWS Organizations by establishing cross-account access from the master account to all member AWS accounts of the company. The master account will automatically have full administrative control across all member accounts.
2. Set up AWS Organizations by sending an invitation to the master account of your organization from each of the member accounts of the company. Create an OrganizationAccountAccessRole IAM role in the member account and grant permission to the master account to assume the role.
3. Use AWS Control Tower from the master account and enroll all the member AWS accounts of the company. AWS Control Tower will automatically provision the needed IAM permissions to have full administrative control across all member accounts.
4. Set up AWS Organizations by sending an invitation to all member accounts of the company from the master account of your organization. Create an OrganizationAccountAccessRole IAM role in the member account and grant permission to the master account to assume the role.

Show me the answer!

Correct Answer: 4

After you create an Organization and verify that you own the email address associated with the master account, you can invite existing AWS accounts to join your organization. When you invite an account, AWS Organizations sends an invitation to the account owner, who decides whether to accept or decline the invitation. You can use the AWS Organizations console to initiate and manage invitations that you send to other accounts. You can send an invitation to another account only from the master account of your organization.

If you are the administrator of an AWS account, you also can accept or decline an invitation from an organization. If you accept, your account becomes a member of that organization. Your account can join only one organization, so if you receive multiple invitations to join, you can accept only one.

When an invited account joins your organization, you do not automatically have full administrator control over the account, unlike created accounts. If you want the master account to have full administrative control over an invited member account, you must create the OrganizationAccountAccessRole IAM role in the member account and grant permission to the master account to assume the role.

Therefore, the correct answer is: Set up AWS Organizations by sending an invitation to all member accounts of the company from the master account of your organization. Create an OrganizationAccountAccessRole IAM role in the member account and grant permission to the master account to assume the role.

The option that says: Set up AWS Organizations by establishing cross-account access from the master account to all member AWS accounts of the company. The master account will automatically have full administrative control across all member accounts is incorrect. Cross-account access is primarily used for scenarios where you need to grant your IAM users permission to switch to roles within your AWS account or to roles defined in other AWS accounts that you own.

The option that says: Set up AWS Organizations by sending an invitation to the master account of your organization from each of the member accounts of the company. Create an OrganizationAccountAccessRole IAM role in the member account and grant permission to the master account to assume the role is incorrect. It entails a lot of effort to send an individual invitation to the master account from each of the member accounts of the company. It’s stated in the scenario that you should achieve this requirement with the LEAST effort, and you can do this by sending an invitation to all member accounts of the company from the master account of your organization.

The option that says: Use AWS Control Tower from the master account and enroll all the member AWS accounts of the company. AWS Control Tower will automatically provision the needed IAM permissions to have full administrative control across all member accounts

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