Written by Chris Koh, DevOps Engineer at TrackIt
As cloud adoption expands, overseeing numerous accounts and services becomes increasingly complex. AWS account governance is essential for safeguarding data, maintaining compliance, and optimizing performance. It strengthens security while also supporting cost management and operational efficiency.
The sections below delve into the best practices for setting up and maintaining AWS accounts, providing organizations with the strategies they need to thrive in a cloud-centric environment.
Contents [hide]
Creating AWS Accounts
When setting up new AWS accounts, it is critical to adhere to best practices from the very beginning. Establishing your accounts correctly might be more challenging initially, but it ensures better security and easier management down the line:
- Email Aliases: Use email aliases for account creation to facilitate easy recovery and management.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Always enable MFA to add an additional layer of security.
- Root Account Safety: The root account should never be used as a regular user account to prevent potential security breaches.
- Logical Naming Conventions: Choose account names that are logical, straightforward, and memorable. This might sound mundane, but clear naming simplifies future management and reduces confusion.
- Foundation for Future Operations: Starting correctly might require more effort upfront, but it significantly reduces the complexity and risk of making changes later, which can often be more disruptive and costly.
Account Segregation
Segregating AWS accounts by environment—such as development, production, and testing—is critical for several reasons. First, Risk Minimization: By isolating these environments, organizations can greatly reduce the risks associated with potential breaches. Keeping development separate from production ensures that experimental changes do not impact critical operational systems, which enhances security and stability across platforms.
Second, Compliance and Control: Each environment often has different compliance requirements. By segregating accounts, companies can tailor their setup to meet these specific regulatory standards without overcomplicating other areas of their operations. This approach not only ensures compliance but also simplifies governance as each environment can be managed under its own set of rules and policies.
Third, User Control and Access: Effective management of user access is integral to maintaining secure and functional environments. Implementing role-based access control (RBAC) helps ensure that employees only have access to the resources required for their roles, further enhancing security by adhering to the principle of least privilege. Regular audits and adjustments to access permissions are essential to respond to changing roles and to address any potential security vulnerabilities promptly.
Best Practices for AWS Organizations
Before diving into governance controls, establishing a solid foundation with AWS Organizations is key, even if you initially plan to manage multiple accounts. Setting up AWS Organizations from the start provides a scalable framework that makes it easy to manage these accounts effectively:
- Organizational Units (OUs): Strategically structure OUs to manage groups of accounts efficiently.
- Consolidated Billing: Utilize consolidated billing to simplify cost management and benefit from volume discounts.
- Management Account: The management account should strictly be used for administrative purposes. It is best practice to have at least two accounts: one for management and another for operational work. This separation enhances security and governance.
- Scalability and Setup: Begin with at least two accounts within AWS Organizations—one for management and the other for operational tasks. This setup ensures that your infrastructure can grow seamlessly with your organizational needs, facilitating the addition of more accounts as required without complex restructuring.
Budgeting and Cost Monitoring
Effective budgeting and cost monitoring are pivotal in maximizing the ROI of AWS investments. When using AWS Organizations, the consolidated billing feature provides a single, comprehensive view of all account charges within the organization, simplifying expense tracking and management. This centralized view is crucial for maintaining control over cloud spending and aligning it with business objectives:
- AWS Budgets: Use AWS Budgets to set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when thresholds are exceeded.
- AWS Cost Explorer: Analyze and understand your AWS spending and usage patterns with AWS Cost Explorer to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and forecast future costs effectively.
- Cost Optimization Practices: Conduct regular reviews and optimizations of resource allocations. Employ strategies like rightsizing instances, choosing reserved instances or savings plans for predictable workloads, and shutting down unused instances to reduce costs.
- Automated Alerts and Workflows: Implement automated alerts to monitor spending anomalies and workflows for addressing them, potentially triggering AWS Lambda functions to adjust or shut down resources based on usage metrics.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Robust AWS account governance is essential for maintaining a secure, efficient, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure. Implementing best practices helps organizations safeguard resources, optimize operations, and retain full control over their cloud environments.
For organizations looking to establish governance correctly from the start and avoid costly fixes later, it is advisable to design AWS workflows with expert guidance. Partnering with an AWS Partner with a proven track record, such as TrackIt, ensures a strong foundation for security, compliance, and cost management. for AI-driven media analysis.
About TrackIt
TrackIt is an international AWS cloud consulting, systems integration, and software development firm headquartered in Marina del Rey, CA.
We have built our reputation on helping media companies architect and implement cost-effective, reliable, and scalable Media & Entertainment workflows in the cloud. These include streaming and on-demand video solutions, media asset management, and archiving, incorporating the latest AI technology to build bespoke media solutions tailored to customer requirements.
Cloud-native software development is at the foundation of what we do. We specialize in Application Modernization, Containerization, Infrastructure as Code and event-driven serverless architectures by leveraging the latest AWS services. Along with our Managed Services offerings which provide 24/7 cloud infrastructure maintenance and support, we are able to provide complete solutions for the media industry.