AWS ‘Organizations’ Helps Admins Manage Multiple Cloud Accounts

Amazon has made a number of announcements at its AWS re:Invent event, including a new ‘Organizations’ service to help AWS customers manage multiple accounts within their business.

The company says AWS customers frequently set up multiple accounts, in order to help their organisation manage costs and resources across various teams, applications and business units, within the corporate sphere.

For example, the IT department running its servers would typically have separate AWS account compared to the application development team.

Scalable AWS Admin

And this has meant that for some firms, hundreds or even thousands of AWS accounts have been created.

The idea behind AWS Organizations is therefore a simple one. It is designed to help the IT manager create, administer, and set policies for multiple AWS accounts.

Setting policies allows the IT manager to manage his or her security settings for example, to ensure that the appropriate AWS service is being used by the appropriate AWS users.

The AWS Organizations service also allows for the automation of new account creation by using APIs to create and add new accounts to a group.

Another useful feature within the AWS Organizations service is Consolidated Billing, which allows a firm to set up a single payment method for multiple AWS accounts.

This allows the IT manager to see a combined view of AWS charges incurred by all thier accounts, as well as get a cost report for each individual account in their organisation. AWS Organizations is currently in preview and will be available to AWS customers free of charge.

Partner Programs

Also revealed at the AWS re:Invent event are three new partner programs that provides tools, training, and benefits to support partners in service delivery, public sector, and VMware cloud on AWS.

The AWS Service Delivery Program, the APN Public Sector Partner Program, and the VMware Cloud on AWS Partner Program are of course geared towards those AWS partners who provide solutions and expertise for those specific services, workloads, and industry verticals.

In addition to these programs, AWS has also launched two new AWS Competencies to aid partners the Financial Services and Internet of Things (IoT) industries.

“There’s never been a better time to be an APN Partner. Customers are turning to the AWS Cloud to address an increasingly broad set of needs across their organisations, which translates to business opportunities for the APN partners that help them achieve their goals,” said Dorothy Copeland, General Manager, Global Partner Programs, AWS.

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