The vendor presents AWS Control Tower as the easiest way to set up and govern a new, secure multi-account AWS environment. With AWS Control Tower, builders can provision new AWS accounts in a few clicks, while knowing new accounts conform to company-wide policies.
AWS Control Tower is great if you have multiple organizations or disciplines inside a company that needs to be separated for billing purposes or separation of concern. Multiple accounts is part of AWS's well-architected framework and are generally a good idea. AWS Control Tower makes central logging easy which enables those logs to be quickly picked up by a logging tool to provide even more reports and insight. For smaller organizations, AWS Control Tower may seem like an over-engineered solution
AWS Control Tower integrates with AWS organizations
AWS Control Tower provides Account Factory to provision preconfigured AWS accounts
AWS Control Tower helps to isolate workloads and billing via AWS accounts separation
AWS Control Tower supports data residency controls out of the box
AWS Control Tower supports post provisioning actions to newly provisioned AWS accounts: for example it can trigger enabling VPC flow logs in the new account
There is no way to easily close an AWS account whether it was created manually or via the AWS Control Tower. It takes too many steps to close it vs to provision a new AWS account
Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, but for us, the use case associated with AWS Systems Manager was a better fit for our specific needs and skillsets. We did not need everything that AWS Control Tower was doing for us.
