News and Announcements

Upcoming changes to the campus AWS service - AWS Organizations

Posted: 2019-07-19 11:14:49   Expiration: 2019-10-06 11:14:49

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2019-07-19 11:14:49. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

UW-Madison has been accepted into Internet2's AWS Organizations pilot. Participation in this pilot will give UW-Madison access to AWS Organizations and will also facilitate deploying CloudCheckr to all campus AWS accounts. More details to be published in the coming weeks.


Our September 3rd email:

As a current customer of AWS, or financial contact associated with an AWS account, we’re contacting you to inform you of an upcoming change to the UW-Madison AWS service. 

What is changing? 

At present, all UW-Madison AWS accounts are a member of a single AWS Organization managed by our AWS reseller, DLT. The change being implemented will move all existing AWS accounts into a new AWS Organization managed by UW-Madison (not DLT). 

How will the change be made? 

This change involves making some changes to root AWS accounts (the email account that is used to activate an account) that will be largely transparent to users. As part of the change, the email address associated with each AWS account will change, but your personal logins will not change nor will any existing AWS workloads be impacted. No action is required on your part. 

All AWS accounts have a root account email that is used by campus customers to receive notifications from Amazon and the UW-Madison Public Cloud Team. When AWS accounts were provisioned, WiscLists were used to create these root email addresses and initial list memberships included account owners, technical, and financial contacts. On 09/23/2019, we will be converting these email addresses from WiscLists to Office 365 groups. The new email addresses will contain the same members as the current WiscLists, so if you’re filtering AWS emails, you may need to update your filters. 

Why is this change being made? 

First, making this change will allow us to leverage many new AWS account management features that will improve both individual account usability and billing management. 

Second, Amazon has committed to developing a number of new features that require Organizations to be in place prior to implementation. With this change, we’ll be able to explore those features in the future. 

Finally, the move to AWS Organizations will also allow faster account provisioning as future requests will not require any work from our vendor, DLT. 

Are there any other changes coming? 

Yes, we’re looking to enable CloudCheckr for all public cloud accounts to facilitate easier management of AWS accounts. Stay tuned for announcements regarding this and future enhancements to the campus AWS service.    

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to the UW-Madison Public Cloud Team as cloud-services@cio.wisc.edu. 


-- Public Cloud Team