Is your AWS environment becoming more complex, increasingly difficult to manage, and becoming the source of potential security risks? If so, it is time to consider AWS Control Tower. As organizations experience the amazing features and power offered to their business by using AWS, it is typical to see the adoption of AWS accelerate across teams within an organization. It is great to see the pace of innovation enhanced by the use of AWS, but if the adoption is not well governed, it can turn into a sprawling, unmanaged nightmare with security risks that would keep any IT leader from sleeping well.
We engage with our clients at two points along their AWS maturity curve. The most common engagements are with organizations using AWS for a few years and have leverage AWS to digitize their operations rapidly. They may have many different teams within the organization using AWS but don’t necessarily work closely together and have different needs for applications, accounts, and access to the AWS services. When their AWS environment was first built, not much thought was put into architecting the environment to support multi-accounts, networking, and security controls. Never mind governance tools, compliance requirements, or automated account creation.
The other engagement happens with clients at the very beginning of their AWS adoption. We typically work with this customer to assess their needs, design their AWS environment, migrate applications and data to their AWS environment and provide our PeakPlus managed cloud services to augment their team 7x24x365 care and feeding of the AWS environment.
Common to both of these points along the cloud adoption curve is that AWS Control Tower is the right service to govern their AWS environment better. For the more mature AWS organization Control Tower is a way to take a foundational view of the AWS environment and get the right governance. Control Tower will reduce the complexity of managing and securing your environment while giving the teams in your organization the flexibility they need without stifling their ability to innovate.
For the early AWS adopter, it is the perfect time to get the right guardrails to provide consistent policies across accounts, automate the creation of new accounts with the correct guardrails, and reduce the time that it takes to design and build their AWS environment. Many of these organizations feel that Control Tower can be overkill for their current needs. Still, we recommend that it is never too soon to have good governance in place, no matter how small you think your AWS environment is.
PTP is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that has also achieved the AWS Life Science Competency. The experience gained from helping hundreds of companies succeed on AWS allows us to help companies accelerate their innovation pace while reducing the risk of operating in the AWS cloud.
Our cloud governance offer has been developed based on our real-world experience building secure cloud solutions with AWS Control Tower. This consulting engagement starts with assessing your existing cloud or on-premises architecture, a deep understanding of your application needs, and an architecture design that covers everything from account creation to compliance, including single sign-on, networking, and security tools, cost optimization, and operational support. At the end of the engagement, you will have a secure, scalable, multi-account, centrally managed AWS environment with the security and compliance that gives you the confidence to operate in the cloud and an AWS partner to support your cloud needs in the future.
By: Ethan Simmons, Managing Partner, PTP
Recent Panel Discussion with PTP & AWS Discussing AWS Control Tower