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Governance & Multi-Account

AWS Control Tower, Landing Zones, Conformance Packs & Drift Detection

Org-wide guardrails, account isolation strategy, and continuous compliance monitoring as code.

Multi-account is where compliance scope is either won or quietly lost. The guides below cover Control Tower, landing-zone topology, drift detection, Well-Architected reviews, and CI/CD that does not become an unaudited backdoor into prod. With AWS Audit Manager closed to new customers from 30 April 2026, evidence collection now consolidates onto AWS Config conformance packs (regulator-aligned control sets, deployable across an Organization) and Security Hub Essentials on its resource-based pricing — the pairing we now recommend for every new engagement.

Part of the AWS Security & Compliance hub.

Guides

8 guides in this subtopic

Services

Services that put these guides into practice

Engagements where we apply the patterns above to your specific environment, regulatory scope, and threat model.

AWS Well-Architected Review — Free Assessment

Free AWS Well-Architected Review from FactualMinds. Identify risks, compliance gaps, and optimization opportunities.

Cloud Compliance Services — HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS on AWS

Cloud compliance services — HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR. Expert consulting from FactualMinds.

Related subtopics

Continue exploring the AWS security & compliance hub

Sibling subtopics that buyers usually evaluate alongside this one.

Compliance Frameworks

Framework-by-framework guidance — what auditors expect, what AWS provides, and what your team configures.

IAM & Access Control

Least-privilege patterns, workforce SSO with identity propagation, customer auth, and fine-grained Cedar-policy authorization.

Threat Detection & Response

Continuous monitoring, agentless vulnerability scanning, OCSF data lakes, forensic investigation, and automated remediation.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions about governance & multi-account

What replaces AWS Audit Manager for evidence collection?
AWS Audit Manager closed to new customers on 30 April 2026 — it remains operational for existing customers but is no longer the recommended starting point. The replacement pattern: AWS Config conformance packs deliver the regulator-aligned control sets (CIS AWS Foundations, NIST 800-53 r5, HIPAA, PCI DSS 4.0, FedRAMP Moderate, K-ISMS, RBI, MAS) deployable Organization-wide; Security Hub Essentials runs the continuous standards checks and emits the normalized findings; CloudTrail Lake (or Security Lake on OCSF 1.1) holds the auditable event store. Evidence is screenshots of Security Hub control status plus exported Config rule compliance state plus CloudTrail Lake queries — the same evidence Audit Manager produced, now without the closed product in the stack.
Control Tower vs AWS Organizations + Terraform — when does each win?
Control Tower wins when your account topology fits the AWS reference landing zone (foundational OUs: Security, Sandbox, Workloads with Prod/Non-Prod sub-OUs) and you want opinionated guardrails (preventive SCPs, detective Config rules, AWS-managed log archive and audit accounts) on a click-to-deploy pattern. Organizations + Terraform (or AWS Account Factory for Terraform / ALZ-Terraform) wins when you need account topology Control Tower will not give you cleanly — for example, a strict per-tenant account model for SaaS, regulated topologies that move log archive to a private account, or air-gapped GovCloud designs. The gap has narrowed: Account Factory for Terraform can now provision many landing-zone resources Control Tower used to own. Pick Control Tower if you are starting fresh and at fewer than ~50 accounts; pick Organizations + IaC if your model is already custom or going to >100 accounts.
How often should we run an AWS Well-Architected Review?
Annually for every production workload, plus before any significant launch (new region, new framework certification, major architecture change). The Well-Architected Tool now covers six pillars — Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability — and lenses for Serverless, SaaS, ML, IoT, FinServ, Healthcare, GenAI, and others. AWS Partners with the Well-Architected Partner status (FactualMinds is one) can run the review, capture the High-Risk Items (HRIs), and apply for AWS Well-Architected Funding to remediate the top items. Treat the review as a programmatic risk register, not a marketing exercise — every HRI maps to a Jira ticket with a deadline.

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