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How to enable Config inside an account inside the Security OU of an Organization running Control Tower?

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We are trying to centralize security reporting in our organization to a new account inside the security OU. We deployed control tower and the default OUs. Following what I thought was best practice we created a new account inside the OU and want to have it be the delegated admin for Security Hub and Config. All the delegated admin pieces are done, but I can't see any details because config isn't enabled in the new account. I can't enable config due to CT SCPs that deny modifying config rules in the security OU. I obviously missed something of how all the pieces are supposed to function together. Do I simply detach the scp from the security OU, enable config, then re-attach?

aws configservice describe-configuration-aggregators

That does give a result for the org, and I can see all the accounts config files in the central s3 bucket. I'm just missing how to bring it all together.

2 Answers
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Accepted Answer

Hi, thank you for the question. Sounds like a tricky situation, but lets try and get you through it.

The Security OU (where the Audit and LogArchive accounts are) is a managed OU, this means Control Tower puts some very distinct controls on it to prevent modification of the resources it deploys. It also shouldn't allow you to provision an account into it, at least while using the Control Tower Account Factory. Did you create the account directly in AWS Organizations?

What would be recommended is you create another OU such as "Security-Tooling" or similar. (It can help to follow the AWS multi-account whitepaper, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/organizing-your-aws-environment/organizing-your-aws-environment.html). Make sure that OU is registered with Control Tower. Move this new account to that OU and enroll it in Control Tower. That enrollment process should enable AWS Config and setup aggregation of findings to the Audit account.

If AWS Config hasn't been enabled, I'm assuming it's not enrolled in Control Tower correctly. A thing to note, is if you want to create accounts in a Control Tower environment, use the Control Tower Account Factory rather than AWS Organizations directly. This ensures all of the Control Tower controls and configuration is applied to the account(s).

AWS
answered a year ago
AWS
EXPERT
reviewed a year ago
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Thank you for your reply.

Interestingly, we did use account factory to deploy the account into the Security OU. We use AF to deploy to the sandbox OU and a few others, and it does a great job of applying all the controls we have enabled. We are new to AWS and are just starting to our journey so it is entirely possible we missed something that should have been configured inside CT/AF to stop it from deploying into the Security OU.

I will follow your steps to create a new managed OU and get the account moved there instead.

Thanks.

answered a year ago

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