Category: AWS Organizations

In this post, we continue with our recommendations for achieving least privilege at scale with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). In Part 1 of this two-part series, we described the first five of nine strategies for implementing least privilege in IAM at scale. We also looked at a few mental models that can assist […]

Least privilege is an important security topic for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. In previous blog posts, we’ve provided tactical advice on how to write least privilege policies, which we would encourage you to review. You might feel comfortable writing a few least privilege policies for yourself, but to scale this up to thousands of […]

The management of security services across organizations has evolved over the years, and can vary depending on the size of your organization, the type of industry, the number of services to be administered, and compliance regulations and legislation. When compliance standards require you to set up scoped administrative control of event monitoring and auditing, we […]

As cloud environments—and security risks associated with them—become more complex, it becomes increasingly critical to understand your cloud security posture so that you can quickly and efficiently mitigate security gaps. AWS Security Hub offers close to 300 automated controls that continuously check whether the configuration of your cloud resources aligns with the best practices identified […]

AWS Organizations provides central governance and management across AWS accounts. In this post, we explain how AWS Organizations can make the lives of your Information Security engineers easier, based on our experience in the Information Security team at Amazon. The service control policies (SCPs) feature in AWS Organizations offers you central control over permissions for […]

September 19, 2023: This post has been update to correct an explanation of multivalued condition keys. You can now reference Organizational Units (OUs), which are groups of AWS accounts in AWS Organizations, in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, making it easier to define access for your IAM principals (users and roles) to the […]

You can use AWS Organizations to centrally govern and manage multiple accounts as you scale your AWS workloads. With AWS Organizations, central security administrators can use service control policies (SCPs) to establish permission guardrails that all IAM users and roles in the organization’s accounts adhere to. When teams and projects are just getting started, administrators […]

October 2, 2024: This post was republished to update the terminology for management accounts. AWS Organizations is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, enabling you to centrally govern and manage your AWS GovCloud (US) accounts. AWS Organizations helps you to centrally manage billing; control access, compliance, and security; and share resources across your […]

September 19, 2025: This post was updated to reflect that AWS Organizations now offers full IAM policy language support for service control policies (SCPs). Details of this new feature are outlined in this post. AWS Organizations provides central governance and management for multiple accounts. Central security administrators use service control policies (SCPs) with AWS Organizations […]

AWS Organizations, the service for centrally managing multiple AWS accounts, enables you to invite existing accounts to join your organization. To provide additional assurance about your organization’s identity to AWS accounts that you invite, AWS Organizations is adding a new feature. Beginning on September 27, 2018, you’ll need to verify the email address associated with […]