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bloglike:2021-03

Issue 2021 - March

AWS Control Tower - Can you change email, change organization name, change organization name?

My customer has decided to change company name, domain name and pretty much everything. Customer in question is using AWS Control Tower for consolidated billing, SSO and ease of management. What needed to be done:

  • change tax(VAT) settings and payment method
  • change name of Organization
  • change email of Organization
  • update email addresses in all AWS accounts
  • update Contact Information(company name, address and website) in all AWS accounts
  • replace domain name in SSO logins

Change of tax(VAT) settings and payment method is a no-brainer. Log into AWS account which was used to setup AWS Control Tower as a Root and you will find both knobs in Billing console. Thanks to consolidated billing and Enable Tax Settings Inheritance tax settings will be updated in all AWS accounts(which is great). On the other hand, payment method is set only in Root account.

Name and email of Organization propagate from Root account. Therefore, all you have to do is to change Account Name and email address in the Root account. Both can be found in Account Settings.

At fist, I was in denial that email of AWS account can be changed. However, as it turned out it's possible to change email through billing console and my information was either old or incorrect. Sadly, you have to log into each and every AWS account. Directly, not trough SSO. You can change Contact Information through SSO, but not email address. I haven't found any API or any other way. If there is one, I'd love to hear about it! If more detail is needed or something is unclear, check Managing an AWS account.

Need to log in as a Root presents problem in case of AWS accounts owned by/dedicated to users unless you the password, which you don't. You cannot get password reset link either, unless you have access to user's mailbox in question, which you usually don't have. I guess one way to work around this problem is to set AWS account email address to something you control and SSO user email to (the real) user's email.

It's possible to update Contact Information(company name, address and website) either through SSO or by logging directly into AWS account. Nothing to it.

Second biggest worry was how to replace domain name in SSO logins. It's possible to change SSO user's email address, but not the login name. In the end, it was fairly easy. First of all, I recommend you to change email addresses in all AWS accounts and whatever is needed to be done there while you're at it. Then we can change SSO in this particular case. I believe there are at least two ways how to do it and the end result should be the same. Either way requires at least AWSAdministratorAccess.

NOTE that I didn't take and test this way as I have discovered it only due to the fact I didn't know how else to change AWS Control Tower Admin SSO account which isn't provisioned through Service Catalog. Once email addresses in AWS accounts are changed, run AWS Control Tower repair and that should be it. Yes, it's that simple, because repair will create new SSO accounts if needed.

Second way to do it is through Service CatalogProvisioned products and in a drop-down menu Access Filter pick User. This will list all provisioned accounts except Root account. Pick user, ActionsUpdate and provide values. In order to get the idea which values need to be provided and where, check SSO and previous runs. This approach is somewhat discussed in Updating and Moving Account Factory Accounts with AWS Service Catalog. Also, if you want to take scripted approach, then you can use UpdateProvisionedProduct API call.

It shouldn't matter which way you choose since the end result should be same - new SSO account(s). Note, however, these are new accounts and nothing is carried over, eg. groups from the old SSO account(I've learnt this one hard way). I strongly suggest to use groups, because they're easier to fix rather than granting access on case-by-case basis.

Also, you will have to, or at least I suggest you to do so, run AWS Control Tower repair in case you've changed email address of Audit user in order to update this information in other AWS accounts. It took two repair runs, I think, until everything looked as it should. Even if you haven't changed anything like that, it seems like a good idea to run repair just in case.

And that should be all. I'm a bit unhappy that AWS account information cannot be changed through API or CloudFormation and the only way is to do it manually. On the other hand, I guess it sort of makes sense.

Zdenek Styblik 2021/03/24 14:00

bloglike/2021-03.txt · Last modified: 2021/03/28 04:33 by stybla