Which AWS service is best for ensuring consistency in compliance across multiple accounts?

AWS Config is the best service for ensuring consistency in compliance across multiple accounts because it provides a robust framework for monitoring, assessing, and managing configurations of AWS resources. With AWS Config, users can define compliance rules using AWS Config Rules, which evaluate the configuration of AWS resources in real time, ensuring that they adhere to specified standards and policies. This is particularly important in a multi-account environment where maintaining compliance across diverse resources can be challenging.

AWS Config allows you to track resource changes, compliance status, and automatically alert on non-compliant resources, which helps organizations maintain governance and regulatory compliance efficiently. Additionally, if implemented alongside AWS Organizations, AWS Config can provide a centralized view of compliance for all accounts, enhancing overall compliance assurance.

In comparison, while AWS Organizations helps you to manage multiple AWS accounts under a single master account and helps in policy management, it does not focus specifically on the compliance of resource configurations. AWS CloudFormation is primarily used for provisioning resources in a consistent and automated manner, but it doesn’t inherently monitor or enforce compliance after resources have been created. AWS Secrets Manager is geared towards securely storing and managing sensitive information, such as API keys and database credentials, and does not play a role in compliance management.