**Simplify AWS Management After a Merger or Acquisition with IAM Health Cloud**
By Joseph Williams
Simplify AWS Management After a Merger or Acquisition with IAM Health Cloud
Current AWS best practice is to nest all accounts inside a single organization, but the unfortunate reality is that this is rarely implemented correctly in large enterprises, and it is practically impossible when companies merge with another company or acquire a smaller business.
AWS account management across large deployments has always been difficult—AWS launched in 2006, but didn’t even roll out organizations until 2017. AWS—despite its many clear advantages—wasn’t originally architected to support the vast array of services currently offered, or to manage the complexity of deployment in massive, regulated environments.
Merger of AWS cloud assets under a single organizations is a difficult—if not impossible—task, and most teams fall back to a system where they maintain cloud assets in separate AWS organizations and accounts indefinitely. In the short term this presents as an attractive solution. Leaving existing organizations intact preserves business logic, protects legacy AWS accounts and settings, avoids disturbing complex IAM permissions and policies, and simplifies the transition of IT staff.
However; it represents a major tradeoff in terms of security and compliance. Companies that split their cloud assets and workloads across multiple organizations have no way to see all of their AWS activity at once. Smaller organizations managed by bespoke teams are often a good choice for an internal department or acquired business unit—but they are a horrible risk for the business as a whole. Each AWS organization a company adds introduces new complexities and communication challenges; and the number of entry points for an attacker can grow exponentially.
There is no way to enforce security policies from a single location with automated tools; security and compliance teams are forced to try to monitor the roll out of each new security procedure in each organization individually. Standardizing protections and rules is extraordinarily difficult, and teams are forced to waste time communicating changes to leaders in smaller departments that could ordinarily stay out of the loop and focus on their jobs.
Companies often rely on expensive consultants—such as certified public accountants, cloud economists, or pricy security firms—to get a snapshot of their entire companies infrastructure once a quarter or once a year.
Full regulatory compliance in an AWS environment with multiple complex AWS organizations and thousands of AWS accounts is a pipe dream, and companies run the risk of incurring heavy fines, increased oversight, and hard hits to their reputation.
IAMHealthCloud—available for Azure as well as AWS—is an all in one solution that provides the security and compliance benefits of a single AWS organization without the cost and headache of moving an entire cloud infrastructures to new systems. Teams working to integrate new businesses into existing infrastructure rely on IAM Health Cloud to simplify the process and secure their assets.
IAMHealthCloud offers a best in class, unique view of every account in every organization in one place. A real time stream of data appears in a single pane of glass, with custom dashboards, analytics, and KPIs that track AWS and cloud infrastructure in a single location. Businesses with multi-cloud setups can integrate their AWS and Azure monitoring.
Data is delivered in flexible, open formats experienced developers can rely on as they build and deploy custom scripts and workflows to address company wide—instead of just division or organization wide—goals. Natural language processing simplifies workflows and lets team spend less time developing tools and more time working directly with problems.
Compliance is simplified and efficient. Audit teams instantly query every account to find and address compliance breaches in real time. Third party audits are cheaper; external auditors no longer have to bill for the extra time it will take to compile data from multiple accounts and organizations.
Alerts for cyberattacks, breaches, and dangerous misconfigurations instantly appear from everywhere—not just from one organization or account at a time. Zero day exploits and other serious problems are addressed as easily in a merged cloud environment as they were pre-merger or pre-acquisition with a single company. Security policies and procedures are uniform and universally applied, and threat response is faster and more effective.
The vast majority of the security and regulatory challenges companies face as they merge AWS assets are eliminated with IAM Health Cloud. Costs are reduced, compliance is ensured, and resources are conserved, not wasted. If your company struggles to integrate multiple organizations thrown together by mergers and organizations; reach out to IAM Health Cloud’s team today. We can quickly help you decide how our solution will work for you.