AWS Control Tower and AWS Organizations are both services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that help manage multiple AWS accounts. However, they serve different purposes and have different features.
AWS Organizations is designed to help you centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts at scale. It enables you to consolidate billing, set up custom policies, and automate account provisioning. AWS Organizations is particularly useful for large organizations with many departments or business units that use AWS resources.
AWS Control Tower, on the other hand, is a service that helps automate the setup of a multi-account environment on AWS, based on best practices and security guardrails. AWS Control Tower provides a preconfigured set of best practices blueprints and a managed set of AWS services to simplify the process of creating new accounts and implementing guardrails for security, compliance, and operational efficiency.
Here are some examples of the differences between AWS Control Tower and AWS Organizations:
- Account provisioning: AWS Organizations provides a centralized way to create and manage AWS accounts, while AWS Control Tower automates the account creation process and provides preconfigured best practices and security guardrails.
- Compliance and security: AWS Organizations enables you to set policies and permissions across accounts to ensure compliance and security, while AWS Control Tower provides built-in guardrails and compliance checks based on AWS best practices.
- Resource sharing: AWS Organizations enables cross-account resource sharing, while AWS Control Tower simplifies the process of sharing resources by providing preconfigured policies and templates for resource sharing.
- Cost optimization: AWS Organizations provides cost management tools like consolidated billing, while AWS Control Tower provides cost optimization features like budgeting and cost allocation tags.
AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower are complementary services that can be used together to manage multiple AWS accounts. While AWS Organizations provides a centralized way to manage accounts and set policies, AWS Control Tower provides preconfigured best practices and security guardrails to automate the setup of a multi-account environment.
