Since last Spring, subscribers to NET+ AWS have had access to AWS Organizations, which provides a management framework for AWS accounts, and permits administrations to apply service control policies to various Organizational Units (OUs) within their Organization.

Late last Summer, AWS announce Control Tower, a feature native way to deploy accounts and enforce Guardrails in an AWS patterned way. This functionality was limited to deployment in a completely separate Organization, but in coordinating with a small team of schools, DLT and Internet2 devised a way to deploy Control Tower. These canary schools reported back that while Control Tower can be run, but most should hold off until Control Tower could be run natively in existing AWS Organizations. Today is that day.

Last night, AWS announce that Control Tower can now be run in existing AWS Organizations! While the participating schools are testing the functionality, it does appear Control Tower can be deployed within the OU of an existing Organization. The AWS team posted a blog post with additional details here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/field-notes/enroll-existing-aws-accounts-into-aws-control-tower/. If you are a NET+ AWS schools who has deployed an AWS Organization, you should be able to test out the functionality today. We would highly encourage you attend the bi-weekly AWS Orgs and Control Tower call to trade notes with your colleagues and share the pitfalls. We have also on more than one occasion found a bug that collided with common higher ed deployment patterns that needed to be reported back to AWS Engineering.

If you would like to attend the call, or request an AWS Organization for your university, please reach out!