Important considerations for GuardDuty delegated administrators Permissions required to designate a delegated administrator Designating a GuardDuty delegated administrator Consolidating GuardDuty administrator accounts under a single organization delegated administrator De-registering a GuardDuty delegated administrator

Managing GuardDuty accounts with Amazon Organizations

When you use GuardDuty with an Amazon Organizations organization, you can designate any account within the organization to be the GuardDuty delegated administrator. Only the organization management account can designate GuardDuty delegated administrators.

An account that is designated as a delegated administrator becomes a GuardDuty administrator account, has GuardDuty automatically enabled in the designated Region, and is granted permission to enable and manage GuardDuty for all accounts in the organization within that Region. The other accounts in the organization can be viewed and added as GuardDuty member accounts associated with the delegated administrator account.

If you have already set up a GuardDuty administrator with associated member accounts by invitation, and the member accounts are part of the same organization, their Type changes from by Invitation to via Organizations when you set a GuardDuty delegated administrator for your organization. If the new delegated administrator previously added members by invitation that are not part of the same organization, their Type is by Invitation. In both cases, these previously added accounts are member accounts to the organization's GuardDuty delegated administrator.

You can continue to add accounts as members even if they are outside of your organization. To learn more, see Designating administrator and member accounts through invitation (console) and Designating GuardDuty administrator and member accounts through invitation (API).

Important considerations for GuardDuty delegated administrators

Take note of the following factors that define how the delegated administrator operates in GuardDuty:

A delegated administrator can manage a maximum of 5000 members.

There is a limit of 5000 member accounts per GuardDuty delegated administrator. However, there could be more than 5000 accounts in your organization. The number of All accounts in your organization is displayed on the Accounts page of the GuardDuty console.

If you exceed 5000 member accounts you will receive a notification through CloudWatch, Amazon Health Dashboard, and in an email to the delegated administrator account.

A delegated administrator is Regional.

Unlike Amazon Organizations, GuardDuty is a Regional service. This means that GuardDuty delegated administrators, and their member accounts must be added in each desired Region for account management through Amazon Organizations to be active in every Region. In other words, if the organization management account designates a delegated administrator for GuardDuty in only US East (N. Virginia) that delegated administrator will only manage member accounts added in that Region. For more information on Regions in GuardDuty see Regions and endpoints.

An organization can have only one delegated administrator.

You can only have one delegated administrator per account. If you have designated an account as a delegated administrator in one region, that account must be your delegated administrator in all other regions. To change your delegated administrator after one has already been set, see the procedure for de-registering a delegated administrator.

Setting your Organization management account as the delegated administrator is not recommended.

The Organization management account can be the delegated administrator, but this is not recommended based on Amazon Security best practices following the principle of least privilege.

Changing a delegated administrator does not disable GuardDuty for member accounts.

If you remove the delegated administrator, all associated member accounts are removed as GuardDuty members, but GuardDuty is not disabled in those accounts.

Permissions required to designate a delegated administrator

When delegating a GuardDuty delegated administrator you must have permissions to enable GuardDuty as well as certain Amazon Organizations API actions listed in the following policy statement.

You can add the following statement to the end of an IAM policy to grant these permissions:



{
    "Sid": "PermissionsForGuardDutyAdmin",
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": [
        "guardduty:EnableOrganizationAdminAccount",
        "organizations:EnableAWSServiceAccess",
        "organizations:RegisterDelegatedAdministrator",
        "organizations:ListDelegatedAdministrators",
        "organizations:ListAWSServiceAccessForOrganization",
        "organizations:DescribeOrganizationalUnit",
        "organizations:DescribeAccount",
        "organizations:DescribeOrganization"
    ],
    "Resource": "*"
}

Additionally, if you wish to designate your Amazon Organizations management account as the GuardDuty delegated administrator that entity will need CreateServiceLinkedRole permissions to initialize GuardDuty. This can be added to an IAM policy using the following statement, replacing the account ID with the ID of your organization management account:



{
	"Sid": "PermissionsToEnableGuardDuty"
	"Effect": "Allow",
	"Action": [
		"iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole"
	],
	"Resource": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/aws-service-role/guardduty.amazonaws.com/AWSServiceRoleForAmazonGuardDuty",
	"Condition": {
		"StringLike": {
			"iam:AWSServiceName": "guardduty.amazonaws.com"
		}
	}
}

Note

If you're using GuardDuty in an manually-enabled Region, replace the value for the "Service" with the Regional endpoint for the Region. For example, if you're using GuardDuty in the Middle East (Bahrain) (me-south-1) Region, replace "Service": "guardduty.amazonaws.com" with "Service": "guardduty.me-south-1.amazonaws.com".

Designating a GuardDuty delegated administrator

The following procedures show you how to designate a delegated administrator for your Amazon organization and add member accounts. Select Console or API and follow the provided steps.

Console

Step 1 — register a GuardDuty delegated administrator for your organization

Log in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console using the management account for your Amazon Organizations organization.
Open the GuardDuty console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/guardduty/.

Is GuardDuty already enabled in your account?
- If GuardDuty is not already enabled, you can select Get Started and then designate a GuardDuty delegated administrator on the Welcome to GuardDuty page.
  
  Note
  The management account must have the GuardDuty service-linked role in order for the delegated administrator to be able to enable and manage GuardDuty in that account. You can enable GuardDuty in any region of the management account to create this role automatically.
- If GuardDuty is enabled, you can designate a GuardDuty delegated administrator on the Settings page.
Enter the twelve-digit Amazon account ID of the account that you want to designate as the GuardDuty delegated administrator for the organization.
Choose Delegate. If GuardDuty is not already enabled, designating a delegated administrator will enable GuardDuty for that account in your current Region.
(Recommended) Repeat the previous steps in each Amazon Region.

After you designate the delegated administrator, you only need to use the organization management account to change or remove the delegated administrator account.

Important

When you add an account as a member, GuardDuty is automatically enabled in that account in the current Region. This behaviour differs from the invitation method, in which GuardDuty must be enabled prior to the account being added as a member.

You must add your organization members in each Region to enable GuardDuty for those Regions.

Step 2 - add existing organization accounts as members

Open the GuardDuty console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/guardduty/.
In the navigation panel, choose Settings, and then choose Accounts.

The accounts table displays all of the accounts in the organization. The Type for these accounts is via organizations. The status of accounts that are not member accounts associated with the organization's GuardDuty delegated administrator is Not a member.
Select the account or accounts that you want to add as members by checking the box next to the account ID.

Note
You can enable GuardDuty in the current Region for all organization accounts by selecting enable in the banner at the top of the page. This action also triggers the Auto-Enable feature that will enable GuardDuty in any future accounts added to your organization.
Alternately, you can use the filter field to filter by Relationship status: Not a member, and then select every account that does not have GuardDuty enabled in the current Region.
Choose Actions then choose Add member.
Confirm that you want to add as members the number of accounts selected. The Status for the accounts will change to Enabled.
(Recommended) Repeat these steps in each Amazon Region to ensure that your delegated administrator can manage findings for member accounts in all Regions.

Step 3 - automate the addition of new organization accounts as members

Log in to the https://console.amazonaws.cn/guardduty/ console using the delegated administrator account.
In the navigation pane, under Settings, choose Accounts. Then select Auto-enable.
Select the first toggle icon to turn auto-enable on, if you wish to enable additional detection features for your new members in addition to enabling GuardDuty select from the S3 Protection or the Kubernetes Audit Logs Monitoring options. For more information about these features see Configuring S3 protection in multiple-account environments or Kubernetes Protection in Amazon GuardDuty . When you have made updates choose Update Settings to finalize your changes.
(Recommended) Repeat these steps in each Amazon Region to ensure that GuardDuty is automatically enabled on any new account, in every Region.

The auto-enable feature enables GuardDuty for all future members of your organization. This allows your GuardDuty delegated administrator to manage any new members that are created within or added to the organization. When the number of member accounts reaches the limit of 5000, the Auto-enable feature is automatically turned off. If an account is removed and the total number of members decreases to fewer than 5000, the Auto-enable feature turns back on.

API

Designate a delegated administrator and add member accounts (API)

Run the enableOrganizationAdminAccount API operation using the credentials of the Amazon account of the Organizations management account.

You can also use the Amazon Command Line to do this by running the following CLI command. Make sure to specify the account ID of the account you want to make a GuardDuty delegated administrator.
```
aws guardduty enable-organization-admin-account --admin-account-id 11111111111
                
```
This command sets the delegated administrator for your current Region only. If GuardDuty is not already enabled for that account in the current Region, it will be automatically enabled.

To set the delegated administrator for other Regions, you must specify the Region you want your delegated administrator to manage. For more information, see GuardDuty endpoints and quotas. The following example demonstrates how to enable a delegated administrator in US West (Oregon).
```
aws guardduty enable-organization-admin-account --admin-account-id 11111111111 --region us-west-2
                
```
Run the CreateMembers API operation using the credentials of the Amazon account you designated as the delegated administrator for GuardDuty in the previous step.

You must specify the regional detector ID of the delegated administrator Amazon account and the account details, including the account IDs and email addresses, of the accounts that you want to become GuardDuty members. You can create one or more members with this API operation.

Important
Accounts added as members will have GuardDuty enabled in that region, with the exception of the organization management account, which must first enable GuardDuty before it can be added as a member account.

You can also do this using Amazon Command Line Tools by running the following CLI command. Make sure to use your own valid detector ID, account ID, and email.

You can find your detectorId for your current Region in the https://console.amazonaws.cn/guardduty/ console from the Settings page, or by using the ListDetectors API.
```
aws guardduty create-members --detector-id 12abc34d567e8fa901bc2d34e56789f0 --account-details AccountId=123456789012,Email=guarddutymember@amazon.com
```
You can view a list of all organization members using the ListAccounts API operation or by running the following CLI command.
```
aws organizations list-accounts
                
```
Run the updateOrganizationConfiguration API operation using the credentials of the GuardDuty delegated administrator account to automatically enable GuardDuty in that Region for new member accounts.

You must specify the detector ID of the delegated administrator Amazon account.

You can also do this using Amazon Command Line Tools by running the following CLI command. Make sure to use your own valid detector ID.

You can find your detectorId for your current Region in the https://console.amazonaws.cn/guardduty/ console from the Settings page, or by using the ListDetectors API.
```
aws guardduty update-organization-configuration --detector-id 12abc34d567e8fa901bc2d34e56789f0 --auto-enable
```
You can confirm that you have turned on the auto enable GuardDuty feature in a Region by running the describeOrganizationConfiguration API operation or by running the following CLI command using the detector ID of the delegated administrator in the desired Region.

You can find your detectorId for your current Region in the https://console.amazonaws.cn/guardduty/ console from the Settings page, or by using the ListDetectors API.
```
aws guardduty describe-organization-configuration —detector-id 12abc34d567e8fa901bc2d34e56789f0 
                
```
(Recommended) Repeat these steps in each Region using your unique detector ID for that Region to enable GuardDuty monitoring coverage for all members in all Amazon Regions.

Consolidating GuardDuty administrator accounts under a single organization delegated administrator

GuardDuty recommends using association through Amazon Organizations to manage member accounts under a delegated administrator account. You can use the example process outlined below to consolidate administrator and member associated by invitation in an organization under a single GuardDuty delegated administrator.

Note

Accounts already being managed by a GuardDuty delegated administrator or delegated administrator accounts with active members cannot be added to a different GuardDuty delegated administrator account. Each organization can have only one GuardDuty delegated administrator account per region, and each member account can have only one delegated administrator.

Ensure all accounts you wish to manage GuardDuty for are part of your organization. For information on adding an account to your organization see Inviting an Amazon account to join your organization.
Disassociate all member accounts from pre-existing administrator accounts, except those under the account you wish to designate as the GuardDuty delegated administrator for the organization.
Designate a GuardDuty delegated administrator for the organization from the Settings page.
Log in to the designated delegated admin account.
Proceed to add members from the organization.

Important
Remember that GuardDuty is a regional service. It is recommended that you designate your delegated administrator account and add all your members in every region to maximize the effectiveness of GuardDuty.

De-registering a GuardDuty delegated administrator

Note

Only the Organizations management account can de-register a delegated administrator.

Select Console or API and follow the provided steps to de-register your delegated administrator. Once de-registration is complete you can designate a new delegated administrator.

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Managing multiple accounts

Managing accounts by invitation