SURFcumulus
AWS accounts contain a primary account contact and optionally three alternate account contacts. Institutions that have AWS account in the SURF AWS Organization have a primary account contact that references SURF. AWS notifies the primary account contact of important announcements about upcoming changes that may impact services used in the account.
The alternate contacts details are optional. We recommend that SURFcumulus users enter contact details for two of the three alternate contacts, viz. an operations contact and a security contact. When contact details are present for these two alternate contacts, they too are contacted if there are important announcents related to changes or issues that affect the operational status of services, or of security related matters, including possible abuse of the AWS account.
The third alternate contact is for billing-related information. As billing and invoicing are handled by SURF, we advise institutions not to enter their own details for this field.
When entering details for alternate contacts, it is best to use a group/team email address or alias for which incoming email will be read regularly.
Adding alternate account contacts is easily done in the AWS console. Below we outline the steps required to complete the process.
Log in to your AWS account. You need to log in with an AWS IAM user or assume an IAM role with permissions to change account information. The minimum IAM permissions to perform updates to alternat account information are:
account:GetAlternateContactaccount:PutAlternateContactaccount:DeleteAlternateContactChoose your account name at the top right of the AWS Management Console as shown in the screenshot below, and then choose Account.
This opens the Account page.
On the Account page, scroll down to the Alternate Contacts section, and click on the Edit button on the right hand side.
Change the values of the Full name, Title, Email, and Phone number fields for the Operations and/or Security contacts.
Finish by clicking on the orange Update button on the bottom right hand side of the page.
Now that you have alternate contact details in the AWS account, you will receive notifications of important issues or planned changes in your AWS account.